Meryl Streep to be Honored by the Costume Designers Guild

Photo Credit: Brigitte Lacombe

The Costume Designers Guild announced today that three-time Academy Award® winning Actress Meryl Streep will receive the Distinguished Collaborator Award at the 19th CDGA (Costume Designers Guild Awards) at a ceremony to be held on Feb. 21 at The Beverly Hilton.

The Distinguished Collaborator Award honors individuals who demonstrate unwavering support of Costume Design and creative partnerships with Costume Designers. Past recipients include Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Helen Mirren, Judd Apatow, Clint Eastwood, Rob Marshall, Jim Burrows, and Lorne Michaels, among others.

For almost 40 years, Meryl Streep has portrayed an astonishing array of characters in a career that has cut its own unique path from the theater through film and television. Ms. Streep was educated in the New Jersey public school system through high school, graduated cum laude from Vassar College, and received her M.F.A with honors from Yale University in 1975. She began her professional life on the New York stage, where she quickly established her signature versatility and verve as an actor. Within three years of graduation, she made her Broadway debut, won an Emmy (for Holocaust), and received her first Oscar nomination (for The Deer Hunter).

She has won three Academy Awards and in 2015, in a record that is unsurpassed, she earned a 19th Academy Award nomination for her role as The Witch in Into the Woods. Her performance also earned her Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations. Ms. Streep was most recently seen in Stephen Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been accorded a Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government and an honorary César. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, a 2008 honor from the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and the 2010 National Medal of Arts from President Obama.

In 2011, Ms. Streep received a Kennedy Center Honor, and in 2014 the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She holds honorary doctorates from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Indiana Universities, the University Of New Hampshire, Lafayette, Middlebury, and Barnard Colleges.

Costume Designer Jeffrey Kurland will also be honored with the Career Achievement Award at the LACOSTE-presented CDGA gala, which celebrates excellence in film, television, and short-form Costume Design as voted on by the Guild’s membership, which includes more than 900 Costume Designers and Illustrators working in motion pictures, television, commercials, music videos, and new media programs throughout the world.

Salvador Perez, President of the Costume Designers Guild, stated, “Jeffrey Kurland and Meryl Streep’s contributions to our industry are immense. As leaders of their respective crafts, their work has influenced and entertained us for decades and continues to do so. We are thrilled to be honoring them both this year.”