WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.— SMPTE today announced its 2026 Honorees, recognizing individuals and organizations whose contributions have advanced media technology and the entertainment industry. The honors will be presented at the annual SMPTE Awards Gala on Thursday, Nov. 19, at the conclusion of the 2026 SMPTE Media Technology Summit at the Pasadena Convention Center.

“I want to congratulate all of this year’s honorees,” says Renard T. Jenkins, Fellows Committee Chair and SMPTE Past President. “Their dedication to SMPTE and to our industry is an inspiration, and their contributions have had a lasting impact on media technology and the people it serves. We are proud to recognize their achievements.”

This year, 32 individuals and organizations will be recognized across 13 SMPTE honors. Among them is the Society’s highest distinction, Honorary Membership, recognizing individuals who have performed eminent service in the advancement of engineering in motion pictures, television, or the allied arts and sciences. Past recipients include Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, George Lucas and James Cameron.

2026 SMPTE Honorees
Honorary Membership will be conferred on John Dykstra, ASC, in recognition of more than four decades of contributions to motion picture imaging engineering. A founding figure in modern motion picture visual effects, Dykstra pioneered groundbreaking technologies and techniques for Star Wars that helped transform visual effects production.

The David Sarnoff Medal is being awarded to Jerry C. Whitaker in recognition of his visionary leadership in the creation and deployment of digital television standards, including ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0.

This year’s recipient of the Progress Medal is Robert P. Seidel, in recognition of his decades of sustained contributions to HDTV deployment, digital television standards, multichannel audio, and the architecture of next-generation broadcast infrastructure.

The Excellence in Education Medal will be presented to Anil Kokaram for his outstanding contributions to academic and extracurricular engineering education.

The Workflow Systems Medal will be awarded to Bruce Devlin, in recognition of his pioneering leadership in the development, standardization and adoption of interoperable media workflows, transforming the industry from tape-based operations to modern file-based and software-defined production.

The James A. Lindner Archival Technology Medal will be presented to Nicholas Bergh in recognition of his pioneering contributions to audio preservation technology.

The Excellence in Standards Award recognizes individuals who have played an active role in advancing SMPTE Standards, activities and processes. This year’s award will be presented to Jerry Pierce (posthumous) and Wade Hanniball, in recognition of their sustained leadership in the development, standardization and worldwide deployment of digital cinema technologies.

Polly Chesnokova, from the AFI Conservatory, will be the recipient of the Louis F. Wolf Jr. Memorial Scholarship, designed to assist students in furthering their undergraduate or graduate studies in motion pictures and television, with an emphasis on technology.

The Journal Award for the best paper originally published in the SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal during 2025 will go to Charles Q. Robinson for “Cinema Sound Playback Level and Audience Satisfaction.” Journal Certificates of Merit will be awarded to David Long, Rod Bogart, Spencer Stephens, Catherine Meininger, Joseph Goldstone, Tim S. Kang, Kathryn Brillhart and Jim Geduldick for “Color Management Principles for LED Panels in On-Set Virtual Production,” and to Tania Pouli, Khaoula Ounajim and Daniel Menard for “Evaluating the Energy Impact of Different Dimensions of UHD.”

The Student Paper Award will be presented to Miles Katz for his paper, “Evaluating Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities in SMPTE ST 2110 Media Networks.”

In memoriam, Henry (Hank) Mahler will join the SMPTE Honor Roll in recognition of his extraordinary engineering leadership and innovation across broadcast audio, color television, sports production and high-definition imaging.

SMPTE Fellows
Nine new SMPTE Fellows will be recognized at this year’s Gala for their outstanding proficiency and contributions to the motion picture, television and related industries. The 2026 inductees are Zandra Clarke, Jimmy Fournier, Thomas Heritage, Harvey Landy, Steve LLamb, Yukihiro Nishida, C.V. Rao, Allan Schollnick and Marc Zorn

More information about the 2026 SMPTE Honorees, including full award citations and honoree information, can be found here.

For information on SMPTE Awards Gala sponsorships and congratulatory Program Book ads, contact Anthony Catalano.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers has announced the full slate of individuals that will be honored as part of the annual SMPTE Awards Gala set to take place during the SMPTE 2019 conference, highlighted by the organization’s Progress Medal being presented to Cristina Gomila Torres.

SMPTE’s Progress Medal recognizes outstanding technical contributions to the progress of the engineering phases of motion picture, television or motion imaging industries. Torres is being recognized for her leadership and contributions to the field, per SMPTE. She is the first woman to be recognized with the Progress Medal.

Another of SMPTE’s top honors that will be presented during the gala is a pair of Honorary Memberships to Paul Kellar and Roderick Snell. Kellar is a leading inventor of a range of technologies and products in the areas of digital video processing, digital image storage, electronic graphics creation, still-image storage and processing and image manipulation. Snell has made contributions to the industry with his more than 40 years as an author, broadcast engineer and international consultant.

Other award recipients include:

• Paul K. Weimer (1914-2005) with the Camera Origination and Imaging Medal
• Michelle Munson with the David Sarnoff Medal
• Elizabeth Daley with the Excellence in Education Medal
• Gary J. Sullivan with the Digital Processing Medal
• Ralph Sargent with the James A. Linder Archival Technology Medal
• Walter Murch with the Samuel L. Warner Memorial Medal
• Anne Aaron with the Workflow Systems Medal
• Elizabeth Pieri and Jaclyn Pytlarz with the Journal Award
• Kenichiro Masaoka, Kazuyuki Arai and Yoshiro Takiguchi with the Journal Certificate of Merit
• Peter A. Dare with the Presidential Procolomation
• Paul Gardiner with the Excellence in Standards Award
• Allan Schollnick, John Wesley Shike, Rick Singer, Andrew King and John Lock with the Citation for Outstanding Service to the Society
• Oscar Eduardo Estrada Torrejon and Nicholas Peretti with the Student Paper Award
• Adam C. Burke with the Louis F. Wolf Jr. Memorial Scholarship

In addition, 15 new SMPTE Fellows will be recognized during the gala: Peter T. Adamiak, David Crawford, Patricia Keighley, Gary Mandle, Sean T. McCarthy, Michael Overton, Julian Pinn, Andrew Rayner, Jeffrey Charles Riedmiller, Michael Douglas Smith, James Patrick Snyder, John J. Turner, Brian A. Vessa and Raymond Yeung. All will be officially elevated to the Fellow position during the SMPTE 2019 Fellows Luncheon on Oct. 22.

The SMPTE Awards Gala will take place on Oct. 24 at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites in downtown Los Angeles, followed by a gala and afterparty to close out the SMPTE 2019 Annual Conference. For more information, visit 2019.smpte.org/home/gala.

LOS ANGELES & WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—SMPTE will roll out the red carpet for the newly announced SMPTE 2017 Award recipients. The individual winners will be recognized during the SMPTE 2017 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition.

This year, Renville “Ren” H. McMann Jr. will posthumously be inducted into SMPTE’s Honor Roll, the organizations highest honor. McMann is being recognized for his work in the development of television and imaging technology. In his career, he was granted 36 patents, including the electronic video recorder, the electronic image enhancer, the color camera system and magnetic scan conversion techniques. He was a key contributor in the development of color TV signal processing and image gathering technology, as well as HD systems.

Paul E. Debevec

The 2017 Progress Medal, which is given for “outstanding technical contributions to the progress of engineering phases,” will be awarded to Paul E. Debevec. Debevec is being cited for his work on computer-generated objects based on measurement of real-world illumination and their application in films like “The Matrix” sequels, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Avatar,” “Rogue One” and “Life of Pi.” He has also helped develop HDR imaging, co-authoring the book “High Dynamic Range Imaging: Acquisition, Display and Image-Based Lighting.”

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The remaining award recipients are as follows:

Camera Origination and Imaging Medal – David S. Corley
David Sarnoff Medal – Phillip Bennett
Digital Processing Medal – Michael A. Isnardi
James A. Linder Archival Technology Medal – James M. Reilly
Samuel L. Warner Memorial Medal – Mark Robert Gander
Technicolor – Herbert T. Kalmus Medal – Joseph Goldstone
Workflow Systems Medal – Randy Ubillos
SMPTE Journal Award – Sean T. McCarthy for “How Independent are HDR, WCG, and HFR in Human Visual Perception and the Creative Process?”
Journal Certificates of Merit – Katy C. Noland for “High Frame Rate Television: Sampling Theory, the Human Visual System, and Why the Nyquist-Shannon Theorem Does Not Apply” and David Long & Mark D. Fairchild for “Observer Metamerism Models and Multiprimary Display Systems”
Student Paper Award – Elizabeth DoVale for “High Frame Rate Psychophysics: Experimentation to Determine a JND for Frame Rate”
Student Paper Honorary Mention – Jonathan Bouchard, for his paper “Quality Control of Stereoscopic 3D Compositing Using Half-Occlusion Geometry"
Presidential Proclamation – Mark Schubin
Excellence in Standards Award – Johann Safar
Society Citation – Elizabeth “Betty” Migliore
Citation for Outstanding Service to the Society – Merrick Ackermans; Herbert Jay Dunmore; John Walsh; and David Wheeler
Louis F. Wolf Jr. Memorial Scholarship – Trevor Canham; Emily Faw; and Catherine Marie Meininger

In addition, SMPTE will announce 12 new SMPTE Fellows during the Awards Gala.

All winners will be honored at the 2017 SMPTE Awards Gala on Oct. 26. For more information, visit www.smpte2017.org.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers have revealed the awards for individual industry members whose contributions will be recognized at the SMPTE 2015 Awards Ceremony.

Laurence Thorpe

Honorary Membership, the society’s highest accolade, recognizing individuals who have performed eminent service in the advancement of engineering, has been awarded to Laurence Thorpe, a key figure in the development, adoption and roll out of HDTV, and Irwin W. Young, who has advanced post-production technology and created or supported the development of critically acclaimed motion pictures and television. Oscar Byram Hanson (1894-1961) has also been named to the Honor Roll, a posthumous recognition of individuals who never received an Honorary Membership in their lifetime.

Here are the remaining recipients:

• Archival Technology Medal Award: James A. Lindner
• David Sarnoff Medal Award: Birney Dayton
• Digital Processing Medal Award: Stan Moote
• Kodak Educational Medal Award: David L. Long
• Samuel L. Warner Memorial Medal Award: Sripal Mehta and Harold Hallikainen
• Technicolor/Herbert T. Kalmus Medal Award: Wolfgang Lempp
• Workflow Systems Medal Award: Annie Chang
• 2015 SMPTE Journal Award: John Hudson and Edward Frlan
• Journal Certificates of Merit: Jürgen Burghardt, Jörg Houpert, and Timo Mayer for “Increased Value of Video Assets: New Technologies for the Automatic Transfer and Digital Preservation of Analog Video Cassettes” and Joachim Keinert, Michael Schöberl, Matthias Ziegler, Frederik Zilly, and Siegfried Foessel for “High-Dynamic Range Video Cameras Based on Single Shot Non-Regular Sampling”
• Presidential Proclamation Award: Charles H. Jablonski
• Excellence in Standards Award: Bruce Devlin and J. Patrick Waddell
• Citation for Outstanding Service to the Society: Charles R. Diehl. Brian F. Kobylarz, Dick Millais, and Herb Ohlandt 
• Student Paper Award: Jan Fröhlich, “Gamut Mapping for Digital Cinema”
• Louis F. Wolf Jr. Memorial Scholarship: Arnav Mendiratta

The SMPTE also announced that 15 new Fellows will be recognized during the event. The full list can be seen here.

The SMPTE 2015 Awards Ceremony will be held Oct. 29 in Los Angeles, in conjunction with the SMPTE 2015 Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition.