Columbia Artists Among 2022 GLAAD Media Award Nominees

Five Columbia artists have projects that have been nominated for the 2022 GLAAD Media Awards. They are: Ray Yeung ’13, Manuela Sosa ’19, Joey Odom ’19, Ashley Lyle '07 ('02 CC), and Professor Tom Kalin.

The GLAAD Media Awards honor media for fair, accurate, and inclusive representations of LGBTQ people and issues. Since its inception in 1990, the GLAAD Media Awards Program has grown to be the most visible annual LGBTQ awards show in the world, sending powerful messages of acceptance to audiences globally.

Pride, a six-part docuseries from FX, is nominated for Outstanding Documentary. Kalin directed the first episode in the limited series, entitled “1950s: People Had Parties.” The show follows the fight for LGBTQ+ civil rights in America, beginning with the 1950s and moving forward through the decades. Kalin is among the six LGBTQ+ directors who worked on the series, exploring stories ranging from the FBI surveillance of homosexuals during the 1950s Lavender Scare to the “Culture Wars” of the 1990s and beyond. 

Yellowjackets, co-created by Lyle, is nominated for Outstanding New TV Series. Yellowjackets is the saga of a wildly-talented high school girls soccer team who become the (un)lucky survivors of a plane crash deep in the remote northern wilderness. The series chronicles their descent from a complicated but thriving team to savage clans, while also tracking the lives they’ve attempted to piece back together nearly 25 years later, proving that the past is never really past and what began out in the wilderness is far from over. The show was also nominated for the 2022 WGA Awards.

Acting alumni Sosa and Odom are both featured in the second season of the Apple+ series Dickinson, which is nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series. Created by Alena Smith and starring Hailee Steinfeld, Dickinson follows the titular poet as she navigates restrictive gender and family norms in 19th-century Amherst, Massachusetts. The show’s second season grapples with the real-life mystery at its center. The enormously talented Dickinson published only a few poems and spent her later years in seclusion, rejecting fame completely—why?

Nominated in the category of Outstanding Film—Limited Release is Twilight’s Kiss, written and directed by Yeung. The feature film was acquired by Strand Releasing for North American distribution after first premiering at the Busan Film Festival in 2019. Twilight’s Kiss is a quiet portrayal of a gay relationship between two men in their twilight years. Pak, 70, a married taxi driver who refuses to retire, meets Hoi, 65, a retired single father. The film studies the subtle day-to-day moments of the two men as they struggle between conventional morals and their personal desires. The drama is Yeung’s first Chinese-language feature film.

The GLAAD Media Awards Ceremony will take place in Los Angeles on April 2, 2022, and in New York on May 6, 2022.