William Dufris
WINS 2020 NORMAN CORWIN LEGACY AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN AUDIO THEATRE
William Dufris wins 2020 Corwin Legacy Award
This year, NATF also presented a Corwin Legacy Award. This is something that the Corwin Award Committee chooses to do once in awhile, to honor someone who has made great contributions to our art, but is no longer living.
And this year, for the first time, we are proud, and sad, to honor one of our longtime friends in this way -- Willian (Bill) Dufris, who had a great career and made important contributions to our art.
Bill lost a heroic battle with cancer March 24, 2020, but he had been part of our world since he attended his first Workshop back in 2005.
And he packed an amazing career into his 64 years: he started with British radio genius Dirk Maggs, playing Spiderman on the BBC, became the voice of Bob the Builder in cartoons, narrated over 400 audiobooks, and founded three award-winning audio theatre companies.
After 13 years in the UK honing his craft at the BBC and working with one of the leading practitioners of the medium, Dirk Maggs, BillDufris returned to the United States to continue the journey stateside. Since then he has founded multiple companies with collaborators Lance Roger Axt and Fred Greenhalgh, and helped forward the idea of audio drama productions to companies like Audible, resulting in Locke & Key and The X-Files.
Moreover, Bill always strove for high standards in the medium of audio drama. His work helped take the medium out of the trope of kitsch, away from the old-timiness of old time radio, to show that in the 21st Century, audio drama should be treated as more than a "hobby": rather, as respected an art form as film and television.
The Norman Corwin Award for Excellence in Audio Theatre, given annually by The National Audio Thatre Festivals (NATF), is the premier American 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 Mr. Corwin himself, who is considered the Grand Master of American radio theatre.
The Corwin Award is announced each year on May 3rd by NATF and presented annually at HEAR Now Festival's Closing Ceremonies.
Since 2010, NATF's Corwin Award recipients have included Tom Lopez, Peggy Webber, Yuri Rasovsky, The Firesign Theatre (Philip Austion, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, Philip Proctor), Erik Bauersfeld, and Marjorie Van Halteren with Legacy Awards to Himan Brown, Stan Freberg and Orson Welles.
And this year, for the first time, we are proud, and sad, to honor one of our longtime friends in this way -- Willian (Bill) Dufris, who had a great career and made important contributions to our art.
Bill lost a heroic battle with cancer March 24, 2020, but he had been part of our world since he attended his first Workshop back in 2005.
And he packed an amazing career into his 64 years: he started with British radio genius Dirk Maggs, playing Spiderman on the BBC, became the voice of Bob the Builder in cartoons, narrated over 400 audiobooks, and founded three award-winning audio theatre companies.
After 13 years in the UK honing his craft at the BBC and working with one of the leading practitioners of the medium, Dirk Maggs, BillDufris returned to the United States to continue the journey stateside. Since then he has founded multiple companies with collaborators Lance Roger Axt and Fred Greenhalgh, and helped forward the idea of audio drama productions to companies like Audible, resulting in Locke & Key and The X-Files.
Moreover, Bill always strove for high standards in the medium of audio drama. His work helped take the medium out of the trope of kitsch, away from the old-timiness of old time radio, to show that in the 21st Century, audio drama should be treated as more than a "hobby": rather, as respected an art form as film and television.
The Norman Corwin Award for Excellence in Audio Theatre, given annually by The National Audio Thatre Festivals (NATF), is the premier American 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 Mr. Corwin himself, who is considered the Grand Master of American radio theatre.
The Corwin Award is announced each year on May 3rd by NATF and presented annually at HEAR Now Festival's Closing Ceremonies.
Since 2010, NATF's Corwin Award recipients have included Tom Lopez, Peggy Webber, Yuri Rasovsky, The Firesign Theatre (Philip Austion, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, Philip Proctor), Erik Bauersfeld, and Marjorie Van Halteren with Legacy Awards to Himan Brown, Stan Freberg and Orson Welles.
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