The Downtown Dinner 2026
Meet our 2026 honorees and performers.
honorees
Liberty Award for Community, Equity & Sustainability
Linda Genereux
Linda Genereux is a Canadian/American filmmaker and an advocate for justice impacted youth and adults. She was the Co-Producer of the short advocacy film Because I’m Sixteen, created by the New York Center for Juvenile Justice to address the need to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 16-years old in New York State which propelled her to become a filmmaker.
As an outgrowth of her experience with formerly incarcerated students while a special advisor to College Initiative at the Prisoner Reentry Institute/John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2016/2017, she became particularly attuned to the importance of a successful reentry for formerly incarcerated individuals in the U.S.
Linda’s last project, When Does Freedom Begin is an award winning documentary on three formerly-incarcerated activists becoming leaders in the struggle to expand freedom, justice and opportunity for people affected by crime and the criminal-legal system. She is currently working on a film with an art-meets-environmental focus set in Montreal and Indonesia.
Linda has an MSc. in Urban Policy and an MA in Art History. Born in Montreal and raised in Vancouver, Canada, she was an entrepreneur, independent art curator and art writer for the national and international press for many years, and is a photo expert.
Liberty Award for Community, Equity & Sustainability
Timur Galen
Timur Galen is a member of the Board Trustees of Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) where he is Chair of its Operations Committee. He is also a member of the inaugural Board of Directors of Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP), a member of the Board of Directors of Creative Capital, and a member of the Board of Advisors of Weitzman School of Design at University of Pennsylvania.
Post-pandemic, Timur successfully managed the transition of both board and executive leadership roles at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), where he served as Chair for ten years, and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), where served as Chair for five years. He currently serves as Emeritus Chair of both LMCC and MASS MoCA and is a co-founder and Emeritus Director of the Urban Design Forum.
Timur also served on the Board of Directors of Regional Plan Association (RPA) where he was a member of its Executive Committee and Co-Chair of its Nominations and Governance Committee. Throughout the Obama Administration, he was a member of U.S. Department of State’s Overseas Building Operations Industry Advisory Group. A former member of Haverford College Board of Managers and Chair of its Property Committee, he has also served on the Dean’s Leadership Council at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and as a Special Advisor to New York Public Library.
Until his retirement at the end of 2021, Timur was Citadel's Chief Workplace Officer and a Senior Managing Director of the firm. From 2015 to 2018, he served as Executive Vice President of Related Companies with responsibility for commercial development and was a member of the leadership team responsible for the development of Hudson Yards.
Prior to joining Related, Timur was a Partner and Global Co-Head of Corporate Services and Real Estate at Goldman Sachs & Co. where he led the development and subsequent operations of 200 West Street, the firm’s global headquarters, and the transformative redevelopment of the balance of its New York/New Jersey campus, including 30 Hudson Street in Jersey City, The Conrad New York, a mixed-use hotel and retail complex in Lower Manhattan, and two purpose-built data centers together with their related technology infrastructure in New Jersey. He also led the development of Plumtree Court, the firm’s European Headquarters in London, the redevelopment of Rational House, its India Headquarters in Mumbai, the redevelopment of Winland International Center, its China Headquarters in Beijing, the development of the firm’s multi-building, multi-million square feet campus in Bengaluru, and the evolution of Goldman Sachs offices in Dubai, Hong Kong, Paris, Salt Lake City, Singapore, and Tokyo, among other locations.
With over 40 years of diversified experience in design, development, entertainment, and financial services, Timur has also held senior executive positions at Walt Disney Imagineering, Reichmann International, and Bechtel Park Tower Properties. A Registered Architect, he completed his design apprenticeship under Pritzker Prize winners Robert Venturi and Fumiko Maki and received his early real estate training at Hines.
Timur, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, earned a BA in Physics from Haverford College, Master of Architecture and Master of Civil and Urban Engineering degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, was a Henry Luce Foundation Research Fellow at Tokyo University, and has lectured regularly in graduate design and business programs at Columbia University, Harvard University, University of Michigan, New York University, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University.
Liberty Award for Civic Leadership
Julie Menin
Council Member Julie Menin is an attorney and civic leader with over two decades of experience in the public and private sectors. Julie most recently served as New York City’s Census Director, achieving a historic result where the City finished number one of all major cities. She has served as Commissioner of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection and as Commissioner of Media and Entertainment. She previously served as a Columbia University adjunct professor teaching on city and state government, preemption, and home rule.
Julie chairs the Council’s Committee on Consumer and Worker Protection and co-chairs the Women’s Caucus. Since starting her tenure with the Council, Julie has passed 18 bills of which she was the primary sponsor, including the groundbreaking Healthcare Accountability Act. Her policy wins include advancing universal childcare in New York City, easing burdens on small businesses by instituting a one-shop-stop web portal for all city licenses, codifying the right to reproductive health services, and creating an Office of Healthcare Accountability to rein in excessive prices. At the same time, Julie has effectively addressed a full range of constituent issues: sanitation and rat-mitigation concerns, street safety, unlicensed smoke shops, robust capital funding for district parks and schools, access to low-cost internet for NYCHA residents, and more.
Julie resides in Yorkville with her husband and children. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude from Columbia and received her Juris Doctor from Northwestern University School of Law.
Liberty Award for Cultural Leadership
Jack Shainman and Carlos Vega
Jack Shainman co-founded the Jack Shainman Gallery with Claude Simard in 1984 in Washington, DC. Soon after opening, the gallery relocated to Manhattan occupying a space in the East Village in 1986 before moving to Soho and then finally to its current location in Chelsea in 1997. In 2013 the gallery added two additional exhibition spaces, one in Chelsea on 24th Street, the other a 35,000 square foot former high school in Kinderhook, New York. In 2025, the gallery opened their Flagship location in Tribeca, in the Landmarked Clocktower Building at 46 Lafayette Street.
The mission of the gallery for over thirty years has been to champion artists from around the world and across a diversity of media. A particular focus is on artwork that is conceptually rigorous and often politically inclined while still remaining aesthetically engaging.
Born in Melilla, Spain, Carlos Vega attended art school at the Universities of Fine Arts in Sevilla and Madrid, and additionally attended classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. His work, inspired by history, mythology, and religion, has been exhibited across the United States and Europe and is in a number of important public and private collections, including the Palacio de los Condes de Gabia in Grenada, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas, and Harvard Business School in Massachusetts. He has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2000, and will be showing a new body of work at the gallery in a solo exhibition this March.
Liberty Award for Artistic Leadership
esperanza spalding
Born in 1984 in Portland, Oregon, esperanza spalding is an eaabibacliitoti* artist, trained and initiated in the North American (masculine) jazz lineage and tradition. Her work interweaves through various combinations of instrumental music, bass playing, improvisation, singing, composition, poetry, dance, therapeutic research, storytelling, teaching, regenerative agriculture, urban land & artist-sanctuary custodianship, and growing in love as a daughter, sister, cousin, niece, auntie, great auntie, friend, while collaboratively decolonizing within and through her hometown community. She founded and Co-Directs Prismid Sanctuary, a non-profit that creates and stewards free artist residency, performance, and workshop space in Portland, Oregon (Prismid.org).
Scroll down to learn more about Esperanza's
*European-African ancestored being influenced by American cultures living in Indigenous Territories of Turtle Island
alumni artist awards
Michael Richards Award for Visual Arts
Chloë Bass
Chloë Bass (b. 1984, New York City) is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), followed by a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015 – 2017), and recently concluded an investigation at the scale of the immediate family (Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place, 2018 – 2024). She will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She is currently working on Since feeling is first (2023 – ongoing), a series of works examining intimacy at the scale of the courtroom and the law.
Sam Miller Award for Performance
Moriah Evans
Sarah Verdone Award for Writing
Normandy Sherwood
Normandy Sherwood is a writer, a director, and a scenographer/costumer. Recent work includes THE MUSHROOM created with Nikki Calonge, presented in the 2026 Exponential Festival; her 2023 curtain spectacular PSYCHIC SELF DEFENSE (for which she received a 2024 OBIE Award) and her 2020 socially distanced bestiary, Beast Visit (both created/presented as a part of HERE Arts Center’s HARP residency); her work as Scenographer/Co-creator of Theater in Quarantine’s Phantom of the Opera (2025) and Nosferatu, a 3-D Symphony of Horror (2023) presented by NYU Skirball; her scenic, prop, costume design for Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods by Bailey Williams and Emma Horwitz (2024), produced by Rattlestick/New Georges; and her costume design for Lisa Fagan and Lena Englestein’s Friday Night Rat Catchers (2025/2026) at New York Live Arts. Her theater company is The Drunkard's Wife, and from 2001-2017 she was a co-artistic director of The National Theater of the United States of America (R.I.P.). Her plays have also been presented by The New Ohio Theatre, Rubulad, The Kitchen, The Brick, The Public Theater (and more) and have been developed through residencies at at MacDowell, Yaddo, Millay Arts, Mercury Store, LMCC, the New Georges Audrey Residency (and more). She has designed costumes for performances by Faye Driscoll, Tina Satter/ Half Straddle, Young Jean Lee, Rachel Chavkin/Anne Washburn and Kristin Marting. She is a Clinical Associate Professor in Expository Writing at NYU and has an MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College.
featured artists & performers
Special Performance
esperanza spalding
esperanza spalding is a Grammy Award-winning musician and educator. Milton + esperanza is spalding’s first new album release since 2021's songwrights apothecary lab, which along with 2019’s 12 Little Spells, both won GRAMMY Awards (Best Jazz Vocal Album). Last year spalding released a protest song entitled “Não Ao Marco Temporal” that was recorded in Rio and addresses the Temporal Framework, an initiative in Brazil that threatens Indigenous Brazilians’ land rights and poses a major risk to the Amazon rainforest. A 5-time GRAMMY winner and 11-time nominee, spalding has previously released 8 full length albums and in addition to working with her heroes including Nascimento and Shorter, she has collaborated with Q-Tip, Janelle Monae, Robert Glasper, Terri Lyne Carrington and many others.
esperanza continues to develop a mockumentary titled “NIGREDO” in collaboration with brontë velez // to research, develop and share liberation grammars in jazz and black dance //
creative consults and collaborates for upcoming productions of the opera “…(Iphigenia)” (music by Wayne Shorter, libretto by spalding) // and through the Songwrights Apothecary Lab collaborates with practitioners in various fields relating to sound, healing, and cognition to develop music with enhanced therapeutic potential.
With her dance project “Off Brand gOdds” and her therapeutic music incubator “Songwrights Apothecary Lab” she co-leads performance, teaching, workshop, and therapeutic-arts research residencies in collaboration with colleges and arts venues across the Americas and throughout the world. She is a 2024 recipient of the Doris Duke Foundation Artist Award and a 2016 Ford Foundation “Art of Change” Fellow.
*European-African ancestored being influenced by American cultures living in Indigenous Territories of Turtle Island
Gala Host
Clare McNulty
Clare McNulty is an actress, writer, and director best known for her five-season run as Chantal Witherbottom on the cult hit Search Party. Her film credits include the SXSW Grand Jury Prize-winning film Fort Tilden, Men Don’t Whisper and www.RachelOrmont.com. She has appeared on television in The Conners, Night Court, Loot, Platonic, and the upcoming Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. Her debut short film as a writer/director, Roach Trip, is currently on the festival circuit, and she is an MFA candidate in Film at the Vermont College of Fine Arts / CalArts program.