03.04.08
Close, Howard, Curry, Hansen to Receive 29th Annual Common Wealth Awards
The 2008 Common Wealth Award winners are: Glenn Close, celebrated actress of stage, screen and television, for Dramatic Arts; John Howard, four-term prime minister of Australia, for Government; Ann Curry, news anchor of NBC’s Today, co-anchor of Dateline NBC, for Mass Communications; James Hansen, preeminent climate scientist, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, for Science. Curry was born November 19, 1956 in Guam. She graduated from the University of Oregon School of Journalism in 1978Curry first joined NBC News in August 1990 as a Chicago-based Correspondent. In 1992 she was named anchor of NBC News at Sunrise. She later helped launch MSNBC and then became news anchor at Today. Before Coming to NBC, Ms. Curry was a reporter for KCBS in Los Angeles. In 1981,
she was a reporter and anchor for KGW, the NBC affiliate in Portland, Oregon. Curry began her broadcasting career as an intern in 1978 at KTVL, in Medford Oregon, near her hometown, rising to become that station’s first female news reporter. Curry has earned two Emmys, four Golden Mikes, several Associated Press Certificates of Excellence, two Gracies, and an award for Excellence in Reporting from the NAACP. In June 2007, she was honored with the Simon
Wiesenthal Medal of Valor for her reporting in Darfur. She has been awarded by America , the Anti-Defamation League as a Woman of Achievement, and the Asian American Journalists Association, receiving its National Journalism Award in 2003. She has also won numerous awards for her charity work, primarily for breast cancer research