Journalists Kayla Grey, Kathleen Newman-Bremang and Amanda Parris and Netflix star Maitreyi Ramakrishnan are among the recipients of the Academy Of Canadian Cinema & Television’s 2022 special awards, it was announced today.
Grey, a producer and host at TSN, Newman-Bremang, a writer and editor with Refinery29, and Parris, a CBC host and producer, are the inaugural recipients of the Changemaker award, described by Academy chair John Young in a press release as “a signal of the Canadian Academy’s continued commitment to foster diversity, equity and inclusion[.]”
Grey has spent much of the last year pushing back against toxic sports culture on her TSN.ca show The Shift; Newman-Bremang, the senior editor of Refinery29’s Unbothered, is an invaluable cultural commentator, and Parris has been a tireless champion for Black journalists and artists in Canada.
Ramakrishnan, who stars in the high-school dramedy Never Have I Ever, will be given this year’s Radius award, an annual prize for “a Canadian whose work is making waves globally.” Previous winners include Stephan James and Dan Levy.
Hockey announcer Bob Cole – who retired in 2019 after five decades as a radio and television broadcaster on CBC and eventually Sportsnet – will receive the Academy’s 2022 lifetime achievement award.
Another recently retired journalist, Rassi Nashalik, is this year’s winner of the Gordon Sinclair award for broadcast journalism. Nashalik, the host of CBC North’s daily Igalaaq news program, became the first Inuk woman inducted into the CBC News hall of fame last year.
And finally, Vince Commisso and John Galway will receive the Academy Board of Directors’ Tribute award, “for their extraordinary impact on the growth of the Canadian media industry”. Commisso is the president and CEO of children’s programming producer/distributor 9 Story Media Group; Galway is the former president of the Harold Greenberg Fund, which finances script development for Canadian dramatic feature films.
The awards will be presented during Canadian Screen Week, which is scheduled to take place from April 4-10. The nominees for the 2022 Canadian Screen Awards will be announced on February 15.
