2026 HUMANITAS PRIZES
KIESER AWARD
Humanitas will honor Winnie Holzman with The 2026 Kieser Award at the 2026 Humanitas Prizes Award Show & Toast on September 9 at Avalon Hollywood.
The Kieser Award honors those who have dedicated their substantial talent, work, and resources to creating transformative stories that celebrate our common humanity. In addition to Holzman, past recipients have included Greg Berlanti, Marta Kauffman, John Sacret Young, John Ridley, Jason Katims, Fay Kanin, and Bill Moyers.
“Winnie has consistently explored the complexities of the human condition with compassion, intelligence, and emotional honesty. Winnie’s work has made generations grappling with coming of age and identity feel both seen and heard,” said Michelle Franke, Humanitas’s Executive Director. “We admire her steadfast commitment to mentoring and nurturing writers, as we saw up close when she twice served as a mentor in our New Voices Fellowship program. We are honored to be recognizing her with The Kieser Award this September.”
About the Honoree
Winnie Holzman is the writer of the musical Wicked, collaborating with renowned songwriter Stephen Schwartz. Wicked will celebrate 23 years on Broadway this fall. It has been performed in over one hundred and thirty cities around the world.
After graduating from Princeton University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize, Holzman wrote and performed with a comedy group off off Broadway, before being accepted into the newly formed NYU Musical Theatre Program, where she studied with such luminaries as Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents. Her thesis musical, Birds of Paradise, was eventually produced off-Broadway, directed by Laurents.
Her breakthrough came when Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick invited her to join the writing staff of their groundbreaking TV series thirtysomething. With Zwick and Herskovitz executive producing, she went on to create the critically acclaimed series My So-Called Life, which starred a fourteen-year-old Claire Danes and for which she received an Emmy nomination and a Critics Choice Award for best Drama series.
Other TV credits include Once and Again, (created by her mentors, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz) Huge (collaborating with her daughter, Savannah Dooley) and executive producing on Cameron Crowe’s series Roadies.
Married for nearly 42 years to character actor Paul Dooley, with whom she’s written two plays, Holzman is also an actor, and was seen in Jerry Maguire, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Comeback and A Man on the Inside. Her play Choice has been produced at the Huntington Theatre in Boston and at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre.
Most recently, she co-wrote (with Dana Fox) both screenplays for the movie adaptations of Wicked.
She is a longtime supporter of The Bard Prison Initiative, the Global Aids Interfaith Alliance, and The States Project.
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