The 2026Gaudium Awards

Monday, September 14 at 6:30 p.m.
The Lotos Club
5 East 66th Street, Manhattan

About the Gaudium Awards

A tradition of joy, service and achievement

We hope you will join us on Monday, September 14, 2026, at the Lotos Club for our annual Gaudium Awards.

Since 1982, the Gaudium Awards have honored individuals whose lives have “illumined the horizon of human experience” through extraordinary achievement in the arts and public service.

Over the years, writers, clergy, actors, composers, journalists, politicians, singers, musicians, teachers, community organizers, philanthropists, physicians and dancers have accepted this honor for bringing us Gaudium—the Latin word for joy.

The Gaudium Award ceremony is not only honorific but through the generosity of those attending significant funds are raised which are distributed annually to worthwhile charitable organizations.

We're so grateful for your continued support and for being a part of our community. With your help, we continue to make a real impact.

The 2026 Gaudium Awards will honor

Ayad Akhtar

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, novelist and screenwriter

Ayad Akhtar was born in New York City and raised in the Midwest by Pakistani immigrant parents. Educated at Brown and Columbia Universities, he studied theater, religion and screenwriting. After working in Italy as an assistant to the renowned theater director Jerzy Grotowski, he returned to the United States and established himself as a major voice in contemporary American drama. His plays include Disgraced, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Junk, and McNeal, a Lincoln Center production exploring the ethics of artificial intelligence.

Akhtar is also the author of the novels American Dervish, a coming-of-age story about a Pakistani American boy growing up in Milwaukee, and Homeland Elegies, winner of the 2021 American Book Award. He has received two Tony Award nominations, served as president of PEN America and was named New York State Author by the New York State Writers Institute.

John Dickerson

Journalist, political commentator and author

A native of Washington, D.C., John Dickerson has built a distinguished career across print, radio and television journalism. A graduate of the University of Virginia, he has written for Time, Slate and The Atlantic, and held numerous roles at CBS News, including Chief Washington Correspondent, moderator of Face the Nation, correspondent for 60 Minutes and co-anchor of the CBS Evening News. His incisive and precisely framed interview questions have become so recognizable that they are sometimes described as “Dickersonian.”

Dickerson is the author of On Her Trail: My Mother, Nancy Dickerson, a memoir about his relationship with his mother, a pioneering television newswoman. His other books include Whistlestop: My Favorite Stories from Presidential Campaign History and The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency.

Anne-Marie McDermott

Concert pianist, recording artist and artistic director

Native New Yorker Anne-Marie McDermott is an internationally renowned concert pianist and recording artist. An artist member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, she performs regularly as both a soloist and chamber musician. Her extensive discography includes the complete Mozart concertos, Haydn piano sonatas, Prokofiev piano sonatas and Gershwin’s complete works for piano and orchestra. She has also premiered works by numerous living composers, and Gramophone has hailed her recordings as masterpieces.

McDermott serves as Music and Artistic Director of the Bravo! Vail Music Festival and is also associated with the Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival in Key Largo and the Avila Chamber Music Festival in Curaçao. An arts leader, educator and mentor to young performers, she has commissioned music from emerging composers and received the Avery Fisher Career Development Award, among many other honors. She holds an honorary doctorate from the Manhattan School of Music, where she once studied.

Catherine McKenna

Scholar of Celtic languages, literature and medieval Welsh poetry

Native New Yorker Catherine McKenna earned her doctorate in Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where her research focused on medieval Welsh religious lyric poetry. She began her teaching career at Queens College as it developed a program in Irish Studies and later taught medieval Irish and Welsh languages at the CUNY Graduate Center. She subsequently joined Harvard’s Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, where she taught undergraduate and graduate students for 20 years and served as department chair for 15 of them.

McKenna has supervised approximately 25 doctoral dissertations and has published extensively on Welsh poetry of the 12th and 13th centuries. Her scholarship also examines the history of the cult of St. Brigid of Ireland, a subject on which she is developing a book spanning its origins in the sixth century through the present day. After five decades in the field, she continues to speak of her enduring love of teaching—and of the Welsh tradition that captured her imagination despite her own Irish heritage.

Award of Merit Recipients

Mary Giudici and Nello McDaniel

Benefiting

Nazareth Housing / Louise's Pantry

Supporting New Yorkers with housing stability, essential services and access to food.

Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow

Helping young people and adults build skills, careers and stronger futures.

Thank you for your generous support—we look forward to seeing you on September 14. If you are unable to attend but still wish to donate, you may do so here.