Announcing The APAP Honors 2025 Awardees

The APAP Honors celebrates and recognizes trailblazers and visionaries of the performing arts field. For more than six decades, the coveted awards were presented annually as part of the APAP Awards Ceremony traditionally held at the annual APAP|NYC conference.

The APAP Awards Ceremony (now The APAP Honors) special event is happening live in New York City on Monday, January 13, 2025 from 9:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. as a breakfast event. Colleagues from across the performing arts will celebrate those who have made an impact on the field and those who are shaping the future.

A full description of the awards criterion and a list of previous recipients can be found here.

Also at The APAP Honors, NAPAMA (North American Performing Arts Managers and Agents) and CIPA (Creative Independent Producers Alliance) will each celebrate their own awardees, and APAP will recognize the winner of the Halsey & Alice North Board Alumni Award that is announced in an earlier ceremony.

The APAP Honors is sponsored by IMG Artists. Learn more about APAP event sponsorship here.

The Award of Merit

Nona Hendryx

Nona Hendryx is an art-rock Vocalist, Composer, Technologist and Multidisciplinary Artist whose career spans decades of sound & style evolution. She is a founding member of the Rock, Gospel, R&B Afrofuturistic group Labelle, responsible for the No.1 hit 'Lady Marmalade' ("Voulez Vous Coucher Avec Moi C'est Soir?”) and she currently holds the post of Ambassador for Artistry in Music for Berklee College/Boston Conservatory. Her audio-visual productions, inspired by Afrofuturism, have been presented by The Metropolitan Museum, Mass MOCA, MOMA, Park Avenue Armory, Moog Fest, Miami Basel, London’s Serpentine Gallery and Somerset House. Her groundbreaking project, The Dream Machine Experience, a music driven Mixed Reality installation combining AI, AR and VR applications, was presented at Lincoln Center, NY in Summer 2024. Nona is passionate about Music, Visual Art, and Technology and continues to be a prolific artist.

Fan Taylor Distinguished Service Award

Pamela Tatge

Pamela Tatge is the Executive & Artistic Director of Jacob’s Pillow, an international dance Festival, School, and Archives located in Western Massachusetts. There she has developed the Pillow Lab, an incubator of new work; enhanced the Pillow’s civic leadership and engagement; and renewed campus facilities. Following the pandemic and the destruction of the Doris Duke Theatre due to a tragic fire, Tatge is leading a campaign to build a new theater for the future of dance that will open in July of 2025. For nearly 17 years, Tatge served as the Director of the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University, Tatge has received APAP’s Dawson Award for Programmatic Excellence and Sustained Achievement in Programming, Limón Dance Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award and NAACP Berkshires Dunham Freedom Fund Award among other awards.

William Dawson Award for Programmatic Excellence

Afa Dworkin

Afa S. Dworkin serves as the President & Artistic Director of the Sphinx Organization, the global organization with the mission of transforming lives through the power of the arts. Recognized as one of Musical America’s Top 30 Influencers, Kennedy Center Human Spirit honoree, and National Advocate Award recipient, Afa is committed to fostering inclusive artistic excellence and evolving the American concert music canon through her work with Sphinx's four touring ensembles and annual programming spanning youth education to leadership development on and off stage. A classically trained violinist, she holds degrees from the University of Michigan and helps to nurture the next generation of leaders through her teaching posts at her alma mater and the Cleveland Institute of Music. Her visionary leadership has transformed Sphinx into a global movement, shaping a future where the arts reflect the rich mosaic that is our society.

Sidney R. Yates Advocacy Award

Lulani Arquette

Lulani Arquette is the Honorable Past President and CEO of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF). A national organization established in 2009, NACF is dedicated to advancing arts and cultural expression that helps strengthen American Indian, Native Hawaiian, and Alaska Native artists and organizations. Under Arquette’s tenure, NACF provided $15M of professional, direct support to over 500 artists and organizations. In collaboration with NEA and NEH, she co-hosted the first ever national convening of Indigenous arts and cultures with numerous public agencies in DC.

Lulani received the 2021 Berresford Prize from United States Artists, an award that honors cultural leaders who have contributed significantly to the advancement, wellbeing, and care of artists in society. Through her passion and dedication, Arquette facilitated the “landback” transfer of a 40,000 sq. ft. historic building in Portland, Oregon that is being transformed into the Center for Native Arts and Cultures, a vibrant artist maker, exhibiting and presenting space.

The Arts Champion Award

Halsey and Alice North

Halsey and Alice met as undergraduates at Earlham College and married on December 31, 1971. Halsey had just received his MBA in performing arts management, becoming the first person in the United States to receive such a degree. They started their careers in North Carolina. Alice earned her MBA in finance and was a corporate banker. Halsey led the North Carolina Arts Council in Raleigh, fundraising for the state and allocating money to local arts agencies. He then headed the Arts & Science Council of Charlotte, leading a renaissance of the arts and a revitalization of downtown. He was an early advocate of utilizing new performing arts centers and historic theaters to be core engines for the redevelopment of urban centers. They learned about APAP and Halsey became a board member and Treasurer. Alice’s job moved them to New York City in 1979.

In 1987, Halsey and Alice co-founded The North Group Inc. in order to work together in projects that advanced their interest in supporting new performing arts centers and historic theaters. As a team, they provided fundraising, strategic planning, and board development counsel for over 200 nonprofit art organizations across the United States. Notable relationships include multi-year engagements with the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC; Maui Arts & Cultural Center, Kahului, HI; Wolf Trap Foundation for the Arts, Vienna, VA; Great Lakes Theater/Hanna Theatre project, Cleveland, OH; Proctors, Schenectady, NY; Michigan Theater, Ann Arbor, MI; Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, MA; Tampa Theatre, Tampa, FL; and Broward Center for the Performing Arts, Fort Lauderdale, FL. Together, Halsey and Alice raised hundreds of millions of dollars in ways that energized those involved, gave confidence and experience to new generations of leaders, and elevated a community’s sense of what it was capable of accomplishing. Halsey and Alice, for example, guided the fundraising for the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, AR, in a way that helped lead to region-wide planning and the realization of a Northwest Arkansas national airport.

Halsey North (1947-2022) will be awarded posthumously.

The Spark of Change Award

Terell Johnson

Terell Johnson, Executive Director of the Chicago Philharmonic and Crain’s 40 Under 40 Awardee, is a leading figure in Chicago’s performing arts scene.

Johnson serves on the Board of the Illinois Council of Orchestras and as Co-Chair for the Harris Theater Committee on Resident Companies. He was selected to join other elite Black and Latinx leaders as a member of Sphinx LEAD, a 2-year program evolving the classical music industry by empowering executive leaders.

Since joining the Chicago Philharmonic in 2021, Johnson has reimagined the symphonic concert experience with a series of inclusive, genre-bending events. Recent successes include the Philharmonic’s Lollapalooza debut with Laufey as the first orchestra to perform at the iconic festival to 100,000+ listeners, and the orchestra’s debut at Carnegie Hall as the finale of its sold-out world premiere tour An Evening with Sleeping At Last.

CIPA Award

Ben Grinberg

Recipient of the 2025 CIPA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Creative Producing

Ben Grinberg (he/they) is a Philadelphia-based performing artist, director, educator, and festival producer. For over ten years, they have created community-based platforms for artistic presentation and exchange both in Philadelphia and abroad. He is a company member, co-founder, and director of Almanac Dance Circus Theatre, an award-winning and internationally touring physical performance ensemble, and from 2017 to 2021, was a founding core faculty member and head of Performance and Artistic Craft at Circadium, the nation’s first certificate granting program in contemporary circus performance, where he developed and curated the Test Flights series. He co-founded Cannonball Festival, a hub for new performance in Philadelphia, and is on faculty at the (formerly UArts) Pig Iron MFA program in devised performance. Through Almanac, they initiated and co-produced the biannual Fit Fest in Penn Treaty Park in 2019, 2021, and 2023. He is a 2024 Festival Academy graduate, a 2024 and 2022 invited choreographer at the Breaking Walls Festival in Cairo, Egypt, a 2022 Subcircle resident artist, and a 2021 APLI fellow. With Almanac, he won a 2020 Rocky Award, a 2017 Suraya Award, and a 2019 Barrymore Award for Outstanding Movement/Choreography. Recent directing and producing credits include Dead Muse, Fix Me, $7 Girl, I Hear You and I’d Like to Respond, The Fleecing, and xoxo moongirl. Grinberg’s work has been presented by Queer Zagreb, Jacob's Pillow, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Morris Museum Presents, Touchstone Theatre, FringeArts, New York Live Arts, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Co, La Casa de Artes y Circo, the Mexico City International Festival of Contemporary Dance, Assembly Festival, Circus Now, and more. Regional performances include Pig Iron Theatre Company (Swamp is On, 99 Breakups, Pay Up!), Theatre Horizon (Peter and the Starcatcher, Hero School), Lantern Theatre Company (The Tempest), and more. As a video collaborator, he has worked closely with artists such as Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Eiko Otake, and Zina Saro-Wiwa. Learn more at www.cannonballfestival.org and www.thealmanac.us.

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