The Tennessee Arts Academy honors individuals and organizations each year in a variety of categories during the Bravo! TAA Awards Banquet and Performance and during the TAA Finale Luncheon. You have already met our six Teacher Heroes of the Month, as well as our Arts Rich Schools winners. This week we want to introduce you to Blanche Pope Tosh, our Joe W. Giles Lifetime Achievement Award winner, and Jerry Zaks, our Distinguished Service Award winner. Congratulations to them both! You can read about the many accomplishments of TAA's newest honorees below.

Joe W. Giles Lifetime Achievement Award

The Joe W. Giles Lifetime Achievement Award is conferred upon a Tennessee teacher, whose life's work is widely acknowledged to have positively influenced the role of the arts in education, thereby benefiting the students of Tennessee's schools.

Blanche Pope Tosh

2024 Joe W. Giles Lifetime Achievement Award

Finale Luncheon

Curb Event Center

11:30 am • July 19, 2024

Blanche Pope Tosh started her life in the theatre in the third grade, when she won a city-wide talent contest reciting a humorous monologue. At age nine, she played a leading role on the stage of the Memphis Little Theatre (now called Theatre Memphis). From that point forward, she was hooked on the theatre. At Memphis Central High School, Tosh was a student of the legendary speech and drama teacher Rebekah Cohen, and studied privately with Blanche Pence and Donna Fisher Brame. She won a four-year Memphis Coterie Club arts scholarship to attend the University of Memphis, majoring in speech and drama and minoring in art, all the while hoping to become a teacher. In college, she participated in almost every theatre department stage production, won numerous best acting awards, and had lead roles in Memphis Shakespeare Festival performances. She was awarded an assistantship to Kent State University, but ended up receiving her master's degree at the University of Memphis.

Tosh began teaching at White Station High School in 1962, and during her thirty-year tenure taught speech, acting, visual art, interpretation, mass media, forensics, play production, directing, and acting for the camera. She directed over one hundred plays, established the White Station High School Speech Tournament, won countless speech and theatre awards for her school and students, and created the first high school black box theatre in Memphis, affectionately known as ABC—Aunt Blanche’s Corner Theatre. 



Tosh has performed in scores of plays in almost every Memphis theatre venue, received two Ostrander acting nominations, and notably, since her first production in 1947, is a seventy-seven year veteran of Theatre Memphis. She has also appeared in films, on radio, and in many commercials and voice-overs. She was a reader for the literature series Through the Golden Door, and portrayed “Mary Morgan” for the National Cotton Council. In her retirement, she was inducted into the Tennessee High School Speech and Drama League Hall of Fame and then began to focus even more on her love for storytelling. Beyond her longtime story readings at several area churches and hospitals, where she is referred to as the “story lady,” Tosh most recently created a podcast called Aunt Blanche’s Story Corner, recording well over a hundred episodes. Blanche Tosh has written and published two children's books and remains an active force in the Memphis theatre community.

TAA Distinguished Service Award

The TAA Distinguished Service Award is presented to an American whose work stands as a monument to the importance of the arts in the lives of all people.

Jerry Zaks

2024 TAA Distinguished Service Award

Bravo Awards Banquet and Performance

Curb Event Center

6:30 pm • July 17, 2024

Jerry Zaks began his career as an actor appearing in plays and musicals across the country. Most notably, he appeared in the original production of Grease and the original cast of Tintypes. He recently directed his twenty-sixth Broadway show, The Music Man, starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster. His production of Mrs. Doubtfire is currently running at London’s Shaftesbury Theatre and on tour in the United States.

Zaks has received four Tony Awards for directing and has been nominated eight times. He's also received four Drama Desks, two Outer Critics Circle Awards, and an Obie. His credits include Hello, Dolly! (starring Bette Midler), A Bronx Tale (both the play and the musical), Meteor Shower, Nantucket Sleigh Ride, Shows For Days, Sister Act, The Addams Family, Guys and Dolls, Six Degrees of Separation, Lend Me a Tenor, House of Blue Leaves, The Front Page, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Smokey Joe’s Café, Anything Goes, La Cage aux Folles, Little Shop of Horrors, The Man Who Came to Dinner, The Foreigner, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, and the original production of Assassins.

Zaks began his career directing the extraordinary plays of Christopher Durang including Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, Beyond Therapy, Baby with the Bathwater, and The Marriage of Bette and Boo. He directed the award-winning film Marvin’s Room, starring Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton, and Who Do You Love, which was featured in the Toronto Film Festival. Zaks is a founding member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York City. In 1994, he received the SDC (Stage Directors and Choreographers) George Abbott Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre.

Zaks graduated from Dartmouth College in 1967, received an MFA from Smith College in 1969, and was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Dartmouth in 1999. In honor of his lifetime achievement in the American theatre, Jerry Zaks was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2013.

"The Tennessee Arts Academy is the single best opportunity to learn, collaborate, and grow as an arts educator. TAA core sessions are so successful because they value process, studio time, and reflection. I think that TAA as a whole is so successful and a breath of fresh, artful air because they understand the need for arts in our students' lives and in the lives of educators. TAA provides time to explore and think and collaborate in ways that are unparalleled to any other arts education training. I feel inspired, seen, and strengthened by the Tennessee Arts Academy. Truly, thank you so much." 

- Amy Duncan, Middle TN

TAA 2023 Elementary/Lower Middle Visual Art Participant

TAA MISSION STATEMENT

The mission of the Tennessee Arts Academy is to provide exceptional quality professional development, arts training, support, encouragement, information and renewal to K-12 teachers and to promote and honor the role of the arts in the lives of all Tennesseans.

The Tennessee Arts Academy is a project of the

Tennessee Department of Education and is funded under a grant contract with the State of Tennessee.

Major corporate, organizational, and individual funding support

for the Tennessee Arts Academy Foundation in 2024 is generously provided by:

Significant sponsorship, scholarship, and event support for the

Tennessee Arts Academy Foundation in 2024 is generously provided by:

Madeline and David Bridges; Marion and Stephen Coleman; Rena Ellzy; Morel Enoch; Solie Fott; Bobby Jean Frost, in memory of Donna Frost; Dorothy M. Gillespie Foundation; HCA Healthcare/TriStar Health; Jim Holcomb; Patricia A. Hudson; Ron and Karen Meers; Michael Meise; Pinnacle Financial Partners; Amy Savell, in memory of Sara and Las Savell; J. Tabor Stamper; Tennessee Book Company; Theatrical Rights Worldwide; Jeanette and Bill Watkins; Watkins College of Art at Belmont University; and Talmage Watts.

The Tennessee Arts Academy is funded in part by

Metro Arts / Nashville Office of Art + Culture. 

Special thanks to the Robert K. & Anne H. Zelle Fund for the Fine and Performing

Arts of The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee for their

funding support for the 2024 Tennessee Arts Academy programs.

Help Support TAA by purchasing a Tennessee Specialty License Plate. A percentage of the proceeds from the sale of Tennessee Specialty Plates goes directly to the Tennessee Arts Commission, which in turn, provides grants to the Tennessee Arts Academy. Click here to learn more about the Specialty License Plate program. Buy one today!