Two-time Academy Award®-nominated production designer Lilly Kilvert will be presented with an Art Directors Guild (ADG, IATSE Local 800) Lifetime Achievement Award at the 27th Annual ADG Awards. ADG’s Art Directors Council will honor Kilvert for her distinguished body of work over four decades on Saturday February 18, at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown. The announcement was made by Guild president Nelson Coates, and ADG Awards producers Michael Allen Glover, ADG and Megan Elizabeth Bell, ADG.
This is the third in a quartet of Lifetime Achievements Awards that will be presented at the ceremony, one for each of the four ADG Councils: Art Directors (AD); Set Designers and Model Makers (SDMM); Illustrators and Matte Artists (IMA); and Scenic, Title, and Graphic Artists (STG).
AD Council chair Evan J. Rohde, ADG, said, “Lilly has designed an impressive breadth of memorable sets, from the controlled, period environments of Nychols Hytner’s The Crucible to the dynamic and surging city streets of Edward Zwick’s The Siege. She has also built a reputation as a strong communicator and collaborator who succeeds in balancing the beautiful with the shootable. The Guild is honored to name Lilly as the recipient of this Lifetime Achievement Award.”
Production designer Kilvert has designed more than 26 feature films and three TV series over the past four decades. She has been nominated twice for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction-Set Direction; once for The Last Samurai and the second time for Legends of the Fall–both filmed with longtime collaborator, director Edward Zwick. Her work on The Last Samurai was nominated by Art Directors Guild for an Excellence in Production Design Award, as was her design for The Crucible.
Cameraimage, the premiere international celebration for cinematographers, honored Kilvert with the Production Designer with Unique Visual Sensibility Award for her body of work that also includes To Live and Die in L.A., directed by William Friedkin, Valkyrie from Bryan Singer, Strange Days, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, and The Siege, also with Zwick. Kilvert’s TV credits include the pilot for Michael Mann’s HBO series Luck, and two seasons of the Netflix drama Marco Polo.
As previously announced, Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Baz Luhrmann (Elvis) and his producing partner and collaborator Academy Award- winning Catherine Martin will receive the Cinematic Imagery Award. Multi- Academy Award- winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio) will be honored with the William Cameron Menzies Award, celebrating his visually striking and emotionally rich body of work.
Michael Denering (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Batman Returns, Jurassic Park) will be honored with an ADG Lifetime Achievement Award from Scenic, Title, and Graphic Artists (STG); Storyboard Artist Janet Kusnick (Silverado, George of the Jungle and Kill Bill 2) by the Illustrators and Matte Artists (IMA); and the Set Designers & Model Makers Council (SDMM) will be announced shortly.
ADG Awards are bestowed upon productions filmed in the U.S. by producers signatory to the IATSE agreement and upon foreign entries without restrictions.
Ex-OpenAI engineer who raised legal concerns about the technology he helped build has died
Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI engineer and whistleblower who helped train the artificial intelligence systems behind ChatGPT and later said he believed those practices violated copyright law, has died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. He was 26.
Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before quitting in August. He was well-regarded by colleagues at the San Francisco company, where a co-founder this week called him one of OpenAI's strongest contributors who was essential to developing some of its products.
"We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news and our hearts go out to Suchir's loved ones during this difficult time," said a statement from OpenAI.
Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on Nov. 26 in what police said "appeared to be a suicide. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation." The city's chief medical examiner's office confirmed the manner of death to be suicide.
His parents Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy said they are still seeking answers, describing their son as a "happy, smart and brave young man" who loved to hike and recently returned from a trip with friends.
Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first arrived at the fledgling AI research lab for a 2018 summer internship while studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned a few years later to work at OpenAI, where one of his first projects, called WebGPT, helped pave the way for ChatGPT.
"Suchir's contributions to this project were essential, and it wouldn't have succeeded without him," said OpenAI co-founder John Schulman in a social media post memorializing Balaji. Schulman, who recruited Balaji to his team, said what... Read More