2024 Kennedy Center Honors Announced; Honorees Include Francis Ford Coppola and Apollo Theater

The recipients of the 47th Kennedy Center Honors, awarded annually to those in the performing arts for a lifetime of contributions to American culture, were announced on July 18.

This year’s honorees are the storied New York venue the Apollo Theater; filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola; singer-songwriter Bonnie Raitt; jazz performer and composer Arturo Sandoval; and the surviving members of countercultural jam band the Grateful Dead. The annual ceremony will take place on December 8 and will air on CBS on December 23.

The Apollo Theater is the first venue to be honored in the history of the Honors. The Harlem landmark launched the careers of everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Lauryn Hill and has hosted milestone performances by the likes of Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Little Richard and Stevie Wonder, as well as by current Broadway musical subjects/songwriters Michael Jackson and Alicia Keys. In 2018, it presented the theatrical adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. It is also the home of the longest-running talent show in America, Amateur Night at the Apollo.

No Broadway or theater artists were recognized this year, though Coppola did direct the 1983 film of The Outsiders. Recent honorees from the Broadway community include Renée Fleming, Dick Van Dyke, Bette Midler and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark's U2.