Diane Louie

2023 SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARDS

Screen Actors Guild Award and Oscar-winning actress Sally Field has been named the 58th recipient of SAG-AFTRA's highest tribute: the SAG Life Achievement Award for career achievement and humanitarian accomplishment.

2023 KEEP MEMORY ALIVE

Keep Memory Alive’s Power of Love gala is a one-of-a-kind food, wine & spirits, and entertainment experience. Proceeds benefit the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health.

2023 BYRON ALLEN SUPERFEST

Byron Allen is a television producer and philanthropist. He is the founder of the US entertainment company Entertainment Studios which includes The Weather Channel. He was a comedian in his younger years.

MUSICARES 2023

MusiCares provides to the music community a safety net of critical assistance in three key areas: Mental Health & Addiction Recovery Services, Health Services and Human Services (support for basic living expenses).

2023 GRAMMY SALUTE TO THE BEACH BOYS

At the Dolby Theatre, a CBS live concert special features a star-studded lineup paying tribute and celebrating The Beach Boy’s legendary career. 

2023 CLIVE DAVIS

Legendary Clive Davis hosts an annual pre-Grammy party (returning for the first time since 2020) that is attended by the entertainment world's elite.

MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES 2022

In an historic inauguration at the Microsoft Theater, Karen Bass is sworn in as Los Angeles' 43rd mayor. Vice President Kamala Harris administers the Oath of Office.

2022 HOUSE FULL OF TOYS

Stevie Wonder's annual House Full of Toys benefits children, people with disabilities and families in need.

2022 LOS ANGELES BALLET

Originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov with a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and a libretto adapted from E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 short story "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King", the original production was not a success, although the 20-minute suite that Tchaikovsky extracted from the ballet was.

KENNEDY CENTER HONORS 2022

"Each year’s honorees add another layer to the complex and inspiring collage of artists that together tell the story of our collective contribution to global culture," says Deborah F. Rutter, Kennedy Center President.

GOVERNORS AWARDS 2022

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences includes more than 10,000 accomplished individuals working in cinema. Its Board of Governors annually confers the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and the Honorary Award.

A HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS 2022

24th Annual A Home for the Holidays Special celebrates families whose lives have been changed by adoption.

GODFATHER LIVE 2022

A symphony orchestra performs Nino Rota’s Oscar-nominated score live to picture.

theGrio Awards 2022

“I created theGrio Awards to celebrate and amplify African American excellence,” says creator Byron Allen. “Celebrating and amplifying iconic individuals is something we can never do enough of, especially for our children.”

MOTOWN: CELEBRATING THE MUSIC, THE MAGIC, THE LOVE

Highlights from the early era of Motown Records with candid conversations and performances by artists and executives who were there.

2022 WORLD EXPO

The Bureau International des Expositions general assembly in Paris named Dubai as the host of Expo 2020. Originally scheduled for 2020 to 2021, the World Expo was postponed due to the pandemic. The event recorded more than 24 million visits in its six months.

2022 GRAMMY SALUTE TO PAUL SIMON

As part of the 2022 Grammy Awards celebration, Grammy-winning artists, and past and current Grammy nominees pay tribute to Paul Simon's remarkable career.

2022 MPTF 100th

Conceived as Motion Picture Relief Fund by Mary Pickford in 1921, MPTF supports the entertainment community in living and aging well, with dignity and purpose, and in helping each other in times of need.

JACQUE FRESCO

Jacque Fresco (born March 13, 1916) was an American futurist and self-described social engineer. Fresco was self-taught and worked in a variety of positions related to industrial design. Fresco wrote and lectured his views on sustainable cities, energy efficiency, natural-resource management, cybernetic technology, automation, and the role of science in society, and advocated global implementation of a socioeconomic system which he referred to as a "resource-based economy."

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN

Marian Wright Edelman (born June 6, 1939) is an American activist for the rights of children. She has been an advocate for disadvantaged Americans her entire professional life. She is president and founder of the Children's Defense Fund.

GALILEO

Galileo Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist, engineer, philosopher and mathematician who played a major role in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. He met with opposition from fellow astronomers, and the Roman Inquisition which concluded, in 1615, that heliocentrism was "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture." He was tried and found "vehemently suspect of heresy", and forced to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest. While under house arrest, he wrote one of his best-known works, Two New Sciences, in which he summarized work he had done some forty years earlier on the two sciences now called kinematics and strength of materials.

JAIME ESCALANTE

Jaime Alfonso Escalante Gutierrez (December 31, 1930 – March 30, 2010) was an educator known for teaching students calculus at Garfield High School, East Los Angeles, California.
Escalante was born to two teachers of Aymara ancestry on in La Paz, Bolivia. He was proud of his Aymara heritage and as an adult would proudly proclaim, "The Aymara knew math before the Greeks and Egyptians". He taught mathematics and physics for 12 years in Bolivia before emigrating to the US. In the US, he had to work many odd jobs, teach himself English and earn another college degree before he could return to the classroom. In 1974, he began teaching at Garfield High School.
Shortly after Escalante came to Garfield High, the school’s accreditation became threatened. Instead of gearing classes to poorly performing students, Escalante offered AP Calculus. He had already earned the criticism of an administrator who disapproved of his requiring the students to answer a homework question before being allowed into the classroom. "He told me to just get them inside," Escalante reported, "but I said, there is no teaching, no learning going on”.
Determined to change the status quo, Escalante persuaded the first few students who would listen to him that they could control their futures with the right education. He promised them that the jobs would be in engineering, electronics and computers. They would, however, have to learn math to succeed. He said to his students, "I'll teach you math and that's your language. With that you're going to make it. You're going to college and sit in the first row, not the back, because you're going to know more than anybody."

MARVA COLLINS

Marva Delores Collins (née Knight; August 31, 1936 – June 24, 2015) was an American educator who started Westside Preparatory School in the impoverished Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago in 1975.
Collins grew up in Atmore, Alabama, a small town near Mobile, Alabama, during the time of segregation in the American South. When she was young, Collins went to a strict elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse in Atmore, Alabama. She graduated from Clark College (now known as Clark Atlanta University) in Atlanta, Georgia.
Collins taught school for two years in Alabama, then moved to Chicago in 1959, where she taught as a full–time substitute teacher in inner–city Chicago Public Schools system for fourteen years.
Dismayed at the low levels of learning that she felt some students were experiencing in particular areas, Collins took $5,000 (a large sum of money at that time) from her own teacher's retirement fund and started a private school in the top floors of the brownstone in the West Garfield Park neighborhood where she lived in 1975.
The school she started was called Westside Preparatory School. Westside Prep became an educational and commercial success. Collins created her low-cost private school specifically for the purpose of teaching low income black children whom Collins felt the Chicago Public School System had labeled as being learning disabled. Collins said she had the data to prove that students were teachable and were able to overcome obstacles of learning via her teaching methods, which she said eliminated behavioral issues and allowed students to flourish.
The one-room schoolhouse of her elementary years influenced her methods. At home her father gave her assignments she believed built her confidence and gave her a sense of responsibility. She felt time spent with students was more valuable than distance-creating audio visual information.

LEONARDO DAVINCI

Leonardo da Vinci was many things: a painter, an engineer, a creative thinker. He was also the inventor of the first man-made plastic, says Alessandro Vezzosi, director of Italy’s Museo Ideale. Vezzosi was flipping through some of the Renaissance man’s notes when he came across recipes for several mysterious mixtures. These mixtures would harden into a material that could be used to make nearly unbreakable knife handles, chessboards, jewelry, or cups and vases, Leonardo claimed.
Intrigued, Vezzosi tried out the recipes and ended up with a compound resembling Bakelite, one of the first synthetic polymers, which was widely used in the early 1900s. But whereas the production of Bakelite involves intricate molds and chemical processing, making Leonardo’s natural plastic required nothing more than painting layers of pigmented animal or vegetable glue onto various templates, including cabbage leaves, lettuce, and ox tripe. “It is ‘plastic material’ in the classical meaning of the word,” Vezzosi says. “It is extraordinary on an aesthetic, scientific, and technological level—and this was over 500 years ago.”

By Jocelyn Selim, May 29, 2004
Discover Magazine
Science for the Curious

MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE

Mary McLeod Bethune was an educator, political leader and social visionary who mobilized Americans to organize and challenge racial injustice and demand first class citizenship.
Mary Jane McLeod was born on July 10, 1875, the 15th of 17 children of former South Caroline slaves. Unlike her parents and all but two of her siblings, Bethune was born free, and was formally educated. After teaching and working among South Carolina blacks, she realized that her “life work lay not in Africa but in my own country.”
In 1904, a single mother, she opened a high school, hospital, and the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls. Daytona Normal later merged with the Cookman Institute for Men in Jacksonville, FL and became the Bethune-Cookman College.
In 1917, Bethune began decades of leadership among women’s groups, steering them beyond traditional self-help and moral uplift toward the politics of agitation for integration as organizations with explicit civil rights agendas attacking racial discrimination and segregation in the Federal government.
She led an organization that trained tens of thousands of black youth for skilled positions that eventually became available in defense plants during World War II. She made sure black colleges participated in the Civilian Pilot Training Program which graduated some of the nation’s first black pilots.
Bethune was instrumental in integrating the Red Cross, increasing public awareness of lynching, voter discrimination in federal elections, and segregation on interstate trains and buses.
She was the first African American woman to be involved in the White House, assisting four different presidents.
It is our pledge to make a lasting contribution to all that is finest and best in America, to cherish and enrich her heritage of freedom and progress by working for the integration of all her people regardless of race, creed, or national origin, into her spiritual, social, cultural, civic, and economic life, and thus aid her to achieve the glorious destiny of a true and unfettered democracy.
Mary McLeod Bethune

Hedy Epstein (née Wachenheimer, August 15, 1924 – May 26, 2016) was born in Freiburg to a Jewish family. She was rescued from Nazi Germany by the Kindertransport in 1939.