Rita Moreno to receive SAG's Lifetime Achievement Award

Rita Moreno, star of stage and screen who visited the Writers Institute in October 2009, will receive the highest award of the Screen Actors Guild, the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Here's a picture of Moreno interacting with an Albany audience during the 14th Annual Burian Lecture, sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute and UAlbany’s Department of Theatre, and funded by the Jarka and Grayce Burian Endowment.

More about the SAG Award: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-207_162-57594869/rita-moreno-to-receive-sag-lifetime-achievement-honor/

"No one is more deserving of this honor than the fabulous and accomplished Rita Moreno," SAG co-president Robert Reardon said in a press release. "[Moreno] is an inspiration in every effort, but never more so than with her civil rights activism, promoting equality and diversity while ushering in a more representative depiction of the American scene on screen."

More about Moreno's Albany visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/moreno_rita09.html

A YouTube clip of Moreno's Albany visit:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0t5Slf-tfQ#at=14

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Thanks Grayce!

We wish to thank Grayce Burian and the Jarka and Grayce Burian Endowment for helping to make possible yesterday's amazing events with John Sayles, and for endowing the Burian Lecture Series.

Other leading personalities of stage and screen who have come to the Writers Institute under the sponsorship of the Burian Endowment have included John Patrick Shanley, Rita Moreno, A. R. Gurney, Michael Mayer, Wally Shawn, Ruby Dee, the late Mary Henderson, the late Harold Gould, John Lahr, John Simon, Tina Howe, and a number of others.

Picture: John Sayles and Grayce Burian.

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