Culture Creators To Honor Druski, Janelle James & Jermaine Dupri
Culture Creators Turns 10: Druski, Janelle James, Jermaine Dupri & More To Be Honored At Anniversary Awards Brunch
- Honorees include Druski, Janelle James, Jermaine Dupri, Bethann Hardison, and Suzanne de Passe for their groundbreaking contributions.
The Culture Creators Leaders and Innovators Awards Brunch celebrates its 10th anniversary with Druski, Janelle James, Jermaine Dupri, and more. Read on to learn about what you can expect from the biggest brunch in culture.
If you have ever attended a Culture Creators Brunch, you know this is the room where the people actually moving culture come to see each other, celebrate each other, and get reminded that everything they have been building matters. On June 26 at The Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles, founder and CEO Joi Brown is celebrating ten years of doing exactly that with an honoree list that is going to have the culture fully invested from the moment the doors open.
According to the official press release, the 10th Annual Leaders and Innovators Awards Brunch is themed “The Future of Culture” and will bring together 400 of the most influential voices across entertainment, media, sports, fashion, business, and technology for what Brown has been calling “Culture’s Biggest Brunch” for a decade. That tagline is earned. Every year, this event puts names on stages before the mainstream has fully caught up, and this year is no different.
The honoree slate is everything. Druski takes home Innovator of the Year, which is well deserved considering he has built a full entertainment empire in the span of a few years from a few online sketches. The man has redefined what it means to be a digital-era comedian, and he has done it on his own terms from the very beginning.
Janelle James — the Critic’s Choice Award-winning and Emmy-nominated star of Abbott Elementary — receives the Film/TV Award. Jermaine Dupri picks up the Icon Award for Music, which is a conversation that probably should have happened years ago, given the catalog he has built and the careers he has launched. Bethann Hardison takes the Fashion Icon Award as the industry trailblazer she has always been. Former NFL player and entrepreneur Andrew Hawkins receives the Sports Award. Jason Lee — whose footprint across media, philanthropy and civic engagement is genuinely impossible to summarize briefly — receives the Trailblazer Award. And the legendary Suzanne de Passe — whose career spans decades of groundbreaking entertainment production, including her work as executive producer on the forthcoming Michael biopic — takes home the Icon Award for Film, TV, and Music.
The brunch will run from 11 AM to 3 PM PT on June 26 at The Beverly Hilton, hosted by Xmayo and featuring a special performance by JayDon. But the most significant announcement tied to this year’s milestone is not just the honorees. As the press release confirms, Culture Creators is launching the Creator Fund — a new Foundation initiative designed to support emerging creators and future-facing storytellers with access, training and capital. Proceeds from the anniversary brunch will directly seed the fund.
Brown put it plainly in her statement:
“Ten years ago, I wanted to build a room where the people moving culture could finally see each other. A decade later, that room is an ecosystem.”
As Yahoo Entertainment noted, this brunch has spent a decade doing something the industry rarely does consistently — which is recognize cultural architects before the rest of the world catches up to what they have already built.
Ten years in, and Culture Creators is not slowing down. June 26 is going to be one of those rooms worth talking about long after everyone goes home.
