Past SOPHIA Life-Long Achievement Award Recipients

TOM BOWER
Tom is an American actor who has appeared in a wide variety of television and film roles from 1973 to present. He played physician-husband Curt on The Waltons. He has held a number of prominent supporting roles including Dan Miller in the 2000 film Pollock and the gas station attendant in the 2006 film The Hills Have Eyes. He also plays the barkeep in the Battlestar Galactica episode, "Taking a Break from All Your Worries". He has also had many notable roles in films such as River's Edge, Beverly Hills Cop II, Die Hard 2, Clear and Present Danger, Nixon, and The Negotiator. His 2008-09 roles include Appaloosa, with Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen, Gospel Hill, with Danny Glover and Angela Bassett, as well as playing Pat McDonough, the father of Nicolas Cage's character, in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Sheriff Bob Maples in The Killer Inside Me, with Casey Affleck, and Crazy Heart with Jeff Bridges. Bower is also an award-winning stage actor

JERRY STILLER
Jerry was born in 1927 in New York City. As Frank Costanza on Seinfeld, Jerry was nominated for a 1997 Emmy Award, won the 1998 American Comedy Award for 'Funniest Male Guest Appearance in a Television Series' and in 2008 was honored by viewers and the Paley Center for Media as 'TV's All Time Funniest Relative'. Among his film appearances were the Academy Award nominated short Shoeshine (1988) with his son Ben Stiller, The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three, Those Lips-Those Eyes, Airport '75, Hot Pursuit and Hairspray (the original). In February 2007 Jerry and his wife Anne were honored with a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, only one of four married couples to ever be honored with their own star.

ROBERT M. YOUNG (BOB)
Bob was born in New York City and has made many award winning documentaries and fiction films. During the period of 2004-2009 he directed 5 episodes of Battlestar Galactica with Edward James Olmos, for which he was awarded a Peabody. This is just one of numerous awards Bob has won, including: the Camera d'Or at Cannes, Best  Feature at San Sebastian and the Grand Jury Award at Sundance Film Festival




GIAN VITTORIO BALDI
Baldi born in Bologna, Italy, 1930, is one of Italy's most heralded and uncompromising producers, writers and directors. He produced several of the most important films of the 1960's and 70's, including Robert Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Pigsty, and Chronicle of Anna Magdalena by Jean Marie Straub and Daniel Huillet. In 1960 Baldi founded the Italian Documentary Institute, with the purpose of promoting the study of the art of cinema in general and documentaries and shorts in particular. In 1999 Baldi founded the Hypermedia University in Bologna, Italy, a centre for media studies, of which he is still the principal.

MAESTRO SILVANO CAMPEGGI (NANO)
Born in Florence, Italy, Campeggi became one of cinema's premier poster artists. He has worked for MGM, Warner Bros., Universal, Dear Film, Rank, RKO, Columbia, and Fox. He designed the posters for 64 Oscar winning films including: Gone with the Wind and Casablanca. He also designed posters for: Ben Hur, West Side Story, Bambi, An  American in Paris, Exodus, Butterfield 8, Singing in the Rain, and hundreds of others.




ALDO TAMBELLINI
Aldo was born in Syracuse, New York in 1930. He was taken to Italy at the age of eighteen months where he lived in Lucca (Tuscany). In 1946, Aldo returned to the United States. With a full scholarship at Syracuse University he received a BFA in Painting, ‘54 and a Teaching Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, MFA ’59. He founded the  underground, “counter-culture” group, “Group Center,” which organized alternative ways and non-traditional presentation of the artists’ work to the public. He pioneered in the video art movement in the late 60’s. Simultaneously, Aldo began a series of “Electromedia Performances” which organically brought together, projected paintings, film, video, poetry, light, dance, sound and live musicians. He founded the Gate Theatre, the only daily public theatre showing avant-garde independent filmmakers. Aldo has won First Place in the “Short Experimental Film by an Independent Filmmaker” category at the New England Film Festival and a Gold medal from the Italian Government, Lucchesi Nel Mondo Organization, in recognition of his lifetime achievement in the Arts.


ALBERT MAYSLES
Two of America's foremost non-fiction filmmakers, Albert Maysles and his brother David(1932-1987) are recognized as pioneers of "direct cinema," the distinctly American version of French "cinema verité." They earned their distinguished reputations by being the first to make non-fiction feature films- films in which the drama of human life unfolds as is, without scripts, sets, or narration. Born in Boston of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Albert received his B.A. at Syracuse and his M.A. at Boston University where he taught Psychology for three years. He made the transition from Psychology to film in the summer of 1955 by taking a 16mm camera to Russia to film patients at several mental hospitals. The result, Psychiatry in Russia, was Albert’s first foray into filmmaking. In 1994, the International Documentary Association presented Albert with their Career Achievement Award. He has received S.M.P.T.E.’s 1997 John Grierson Award for Documentary, the American Society of Cinematographers’ 1998 President’s Award - given for the first time to a documentarian, the Boston Film and Video Foundation’s 1998 Vision Award, Toronto's Hot Docs 1999 Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1999 Flaherty Award and the Thessaloniki 2001 Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1999 Eastman Kodak saluted Albert as one of the 100 world's finest cinematographers.Albert received the Sundance Film Festival 2001 Cinematography Award for Documentaries for Lalee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton. In 2001 Lalee's Kin was nominated for an Academy Award and in 2004 the film received the DuPont Columbia Gold Baton Award.