Three-time Peabody Award winner, producer, director, writer and reporter Marjorie Van Halteren has been named the recipient of the 2018 Norman Corwin Award for Excellence in Audio Theatre. The award will be presented during the annual Hear Now Festival’s closing ceremonies on June 10 in Kansas City.
Van Halteren studied theatre in the Universities of Michigan and Montana, and performance at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Upon graduation, she was instrumental in reviving radio theatre through her work as a producer at WNYC New York. There, she created the series “The Radio Stage,” which commissioned dozens of new works. She also produced documentaries and news features, winning her first Peabody Award in 1985 for “Breakdown and Back,” a radio series on mental illness.
[Read: Radio Great Norman Corwin Dies, Age 101]
She has produced programs in several countries, including the BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, Radio Netherlands, and Westdeutscher Rundfunk Cologne. In America, Van Halteren was a founding member of the Association of Independents in Radio, helped produce the “Bob and Ray” public radio show for NPR, and taught and directed plays at the Midwest Radio Theatre Workshop.
Van Halteren has also been active in higher education, teaching audio and other media, creative technique and cultural subjects at institutions including Fordham University and New York University in the United States, and schools in Belgium, France, Bulgaria and China.
The Norman Corwin Award for Excellence in Audio Theatre is given annually by The National Audio Theatre Festivals. It is a recognition of lifetime achievement, regardless of media, in the field of audio theatre. It was instituted May 3, 2010, on Norman Corwin’s 100th birthday. The first Award was given to Corwin himself, who is considered the grand master of American radio theatre. He died at age 101 in October of 2011.
