Events

2024 Sentinel Awards

Writers's Guild Theater

Comedian, actor and voice artist Laraine Newman brought her Saturday Night Live OG energy as the host of the 2024 Sentinel Awards, which honored 11 shows for outstanding TV entertainment that makes a difference. The red-carpet event, presented by Hollywood, Health & Society (HH&S), a program of the USC Annenberg…

Do The Write Thing 5: Where Creativity and Community Meet

The Aster

The fifth installment of Hollywood, Health & Society’s Do the Write Thing mixer saw the unveiling of HH&S’s explainer video on systemic racism narrated by Jason George of Station 19 and Todd Grinnell of Norman Lear’s One Day at a Time reboot before a packed room of BIPOC writers,…

Abortion 2025: Where Do We Go From Here?

Ms. Magazine

A black dress, bought on Amazon, was the small detail that brought home a poignant truth about the challenges women encounter in finding abortion care in a post-Roe America. Dr. Austin Dennard, an OB-GYN in Dallas, had Zoomed in to the panel discussion “Abortion 2025: Where Do We Go…

Do the Write Thing 4: Where Creativity and Community Meet

The Aster

The fourth gathering of Hollywood, Health & Society’s Do the Write Thing mixer event brought together a crowded room of industry guests and hopefuls to hear showrunners Janine Sherman Barrois of the limited Apple TV+ series The Big Cigar and Marqui Jackson of The CW shows All American and  All…

Panelists at Do the Write Thing mixer event in Hollywood

One Last trip: Psychedelics and Dreams at End of Life

Online

An online lunchtime discussion that delved into the use of psychedelics and dreams to ease the end-of-life experience. The ritual use of psychedelics to heal and ease suffering is an ancient practice, and today it’s a re-emerging field of study, this time for their effectiveness in hospice and palliative…

Graphic for webinar event on psychedelics and end of life care

2023 Sentinel Awards

Writers Guild Theater

Norman Lear, the legendary Emmy Award-winning television producer whose regular attendance at the Sentinel Awards had been an inspiring presence at the annual red-carpet event, took center stage in spirit this year during a celebrity-filled show hosted by comedian and writer Larry Wilmore at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly…

Actress Kathryn Hahn, center, and the creative team of Hulu's "Tiny Beautiful Things" pose on the red carpet at the 2023 Sentinel Awards.

Do the Write Thing 3: Where Community and Creativity Meet

The room at the Aster hotel buzzed with entertainment creatives celebrating the end of the WGA strike after five challenging months. Some of the guests were already writers who were reuniting with colleagues, while others were there to simply mix and mingle and perhaps move toward getting their first job.

Do the Write Thing Mixer 2: Where Community and Creativity Meet

The Aster

During a loose and lively conversation held at the Aster in Hollywood, veteran producers and writers Zoanne Clack and Gloria Calderón Kellett regaled a room full of guests with their stories about how they broke into the entertainment industry, sometimes with the help of others who served as their mentors.

Statecraft Stories: A Storytelling Workshop

What happens when you bring Hollywood to a Washington, D.C. think tank? The Statecraft Stories workshop, held virtually in July, invited Quincy Institute researchers, policy analysts, CNN contributors, journalists, authors, veterans, and a former CIA staffer to put aside their jobs promoting diplomacy to participate in interactive sessions designed to provide powerful storytelling tools in communicating important messages.

Plastic Pollution Toxic Tour

It’s no secret that plastic is bad for the environment, but the inextricable relationship between plastic and fossil fuels is often overlooked: 99% of the world’s plastic is made from refined fossil fuels, and plastic harms the planet at every stage of its eternal life cycle, beginning with air pollution and carbon emissions from the oil refineries that create plastic and ending with waste polluting the oceans and littering the Earth.