This month, with the addition of 11 newly minted inductees, the Austin Arts Hall of Fame swells to a nice, round number.
Twenty-five years ago, critics handed out honors to the first Hall of Fame class. The tradition faded for five years, partly because of the COVID-19 crisis, and then returned in 2025.
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One way or another, that makes 150 inductees over the course of 20 classes, with posthumous tributes going back to the age of Elisabet Ney and Clara Driscoll.
Austin Arts Hall of Fame Class of 2026
Like last year, a panel of 10 previous honorees made informal endorsements based on a lineup of artists, leaders, educators, backers and others who have contributed significantly to the community over the course of decades.
Each new inductee will be lionized at separate gatherings later this year.
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Donnie Ray Albert
Donnie Ray Albert narrates “Lincoln Portrait” as the Austin Youth Orchestra performs during a Sunday concert dedicated to Draylen Mason. He was one of the people killed in the bombings that terrorized Austin. [NICK WAGNER/AMERICAN-STATESMAN]
Austin American-Statesman
Singer, educator (University of Texas Butler School of Music): We’re one year late on this honor. In 2025, the esteemed Austin baritone was inducted into the Opera America Hall of Fame at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. “The recognition celebrates not only Albert’s commanding voice and compelling stage presence, but also his lasting influence as a teacher, mentor and advocate for young artists,” the Butler School of Music announced. “Widely regarded as one of the leading Verdi baritones of his generation, he has brought remarkable depth and nuance to roles such as Rigoletto, Macbeth and Germont, earning acclaim for both his vocal power and dramatic insight.”
During Albert’s 50 years of performing, he has played with top companies such as the Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Opera and Royal Opera House, as well as at concert halls in Cologne, Prague, Vienna and Milan. Luckily, he calls Austin home, where he has appeared in shows such as Austin Opera’s “The Manchurian Candidate.”
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Ron Berry
Art Alliance Austin Executive Director Meredith Powell (left) and Fusebox Festival founder & co-Artistic Director Ron Berry as they pose with a yarn-covered lamppost on East Cesar Chavez Street, Austin, Texas, April 19, 2010.
John Anderson/Getty Images
Actor, director, company founder, artistic director (Refraction Arts Project, Blue Theatre, Fusebox Festival): Every good city deserves a Ron Berry. His endless curiosity, boundless enthusiasm, matchless organizational skills, and singular knowledge of world art helped make Austin a global hub for innovative performance.
Early on, he gave the city Refraction Arts Project and Blue Theatre, which helped define the Austin aesthetic from the 1990s onward. His Fusebox Festival, which matches world talents with local breakouts, remains his paramount contribution. Now partnered with Bob Bursey of Texas Performing Arts, Berry has recently made his artistic finds an integral part of the UT campus. He is one of a kind.
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Stephen L. Clark
Over the years, Stephen L. Clark has turned his galleries into a cultural clubhouses for photographers, writers, artists, musicians and other Texans.
MICHAEL BARNES/AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Gallerist (Stephen L. Clark Gallery): Few people are as connected to Austin’s endless creativity as Steve Clark, who gathers together gifted photographers, musicians, filmmakers, publishers, authors and artists who have helped define our city.
Steve founded the Waterloo Ice House group in 1976 as a casual food, drink and cultural center, then ran a high-quality gallery in a historic building he shared with North Star creators Bill and Sally Wittliff. There, he has introduced Austin to and presented the work of such exceptional art stars as Keith Carter, Kate Breakey, Lance Letscher, Ave Bonar, Graciela Iturbide and Bill Wittliff himself.
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A peerless storyteller, he’s the type of guy you’d like to hear hold forth at a Hill Country campfire, as he sharpens his tales about Austin’s history of singular characters.
Franchelle Dorn
Erik Mathew and Fran Dorn in Austin Shakespeare’s production of “Medea,” 2016.
Bret Brookshire/Austin Shakespeare
Actor, educator (UT Department of Theatre & Dance): Nobody commands more respect on the stage than Fran Dorn. Her indelible presentation of each distinct character has made her a natural leading lady in countless plays.
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She has rallied audiences from her hometown, Houston, to her second home, Washington, D.C., where she was a resident actor at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, and won multiple Helen Hayes Awards, and to the home she still shares in Austin with her husband, Edwin Dorn, who teaches at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.
She trained at Yale School of Drama alongside Meryl Streep, and once brought the superstar to UT for an unforgettable onstage conversation. Quite a few classic plays would not have seen the light of day in Austin without her name on the marquee. She’s also a deeply respected acting teacher. In person, she’s warm, lively and a bearer of the best backstage stories.
Matt Hinsley
Austin Classical Guitar executive director Matthew Hinsley plays one of his favorite pieces in his backyard studio in Austin.
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILE, Austin American-Statesman
Musician, educator, arts advocate (Austin Classical Guitar): You’ve probably never met another artist who has been honored as a top social worker by a statewide organization. Yet Matt Hinsley has found a way to make his art serve humanity directly, taking group guitar lessons to detention centers and the like, and by devising ways to teach guitar to the blind and visually impaired, for instance.
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This is not to downplay Hinsley’s fine way with guitar strings, or his inspirational leadership of Austin Classical Guitar, the organization he has been running for 30 years. Through ACG, he developed GuitarCurriculum, an online resource for musical instruction that has been adopted in more than 50 area schools and is used internationally, and founded The Rosette, a performance space that also serves as the company’s snug home at the Baker School in Hyde Park.
Sondra Lomax
Sondra Lomax made a career as a dancer, dance writer and arts administrator.
Renay Bowles/American-Statesman File
Dancer, dance writer, arts administrator (UT College of Fine Arts, American-Statesman): Sondra Lomax has done it all. She did it with dignity, grace and a sly sense of humor. Trained as a ballet dancer, she became a dance scholar and critic during the 1980s and ‘90s. That second career included a long stint as this newspaper’s dance reporter.
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Yet among her lasting achievements has been raising money for the UT College of Fine Arts, something she has done under a series of deans, provosts, presidents and development managers. It is easy to say “yes” to Lomax, since she knows intimately how the arts work and, just as importantly, how universities work. Recently retired, she knows Austin inside and out, and will likely remain a resource for her citywide community of like minds.
Beili Liu
Austin artist and UT faculty member Beili Liu works on her solo exhibit, “Amass.”
Austin American-Statesman
Artist, educator (UT Department of Art & Art History): Once you encounter the haunting beauty of Beili Liu’s art, you never forget it. A recipient of the Dallas Museum of Art’s 2025 Awards and a beloved teacher, she is perhaps best known for large, thoughtful works of public art, such as Thirst, the epic installation of a 38-foot-tall ghostly tree in the center of Lady Bird Lake.
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In 2021, Vivie Behrens wrote in the Austin Chronicle about Beili Liu’s ethereal steel sculpture that will bejewel the city’s streets for the next 50 to 100 years: “The work offers a rare moment of stillness in a bustling hub of city life. Perched on a street called Electric Drive in the walkable Seaholm District, the 14-foot-tall ‘Cloud Pavilion’ features a grouping of amorphous, puddle-shaped rings supported by long, tilted poles that point your attention skyward, like the angled falling of rain in the distance. The work shimmers in the urban landscape, so that even as a freight train rumbles above it, cars whoosh along nearby Cesar Chavez and Lady Bird Lake trickles in the distance, it creates the illusion of people, nature and infrastructure in peaceful coexistence.”
Parallelogramophonograph
Parallelogramophonograph — or, as they are more commonly known, PGraph -— was the headliner for Bexar Stage’s Big-Little Comedy Fest.
Big-Little Comedy Fest
Improv group, educators (Hideout Theatre): When Austin became a national focal point for improvisational comedy, this group led the way. Founded by Kaci Beeler, Valerie Ward, Kareem Badr and Roy Janik in 2005, the troupe has spent two decades mastering long-form narrative improv, often in unlikely genres: screwball comedy, French farce or film noir in a Jane Austen setting. Their success has them in high demand across the globe — as both performers and teachers of improv.
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Until recently, their home base was the Hideout Theatre, a small performance venue and coffee shop on Congress Avenue. Badr and Janik helped assume management of the space in 2009, and with PGraph turned it into a kind of clubhouse for devoted fans of improv.
Winner of multiple accolades, including the Austin Critics Table Award and the Austin Chronicle Best of Austin Award for “Most Continuously Innovative Improv Troupe,” PGraph is to improv what Esther’s Follies is to Austin sketch comedy. One thing that sets them apart from other such troupes is their ability to conquer the long form: Satirizing a complete French movie, for instance, or making up an entire Shakespearean play on the spot.
Turk and Christy Pipkin
Turk and Christy Pipkin at the Illumine event benefiting Austin Public Library Friends Foundation at the Hilton Austin, November 9, 2012.
Austin American-Statesman
Company founders, performers, philanthropists, educators (The Nobelity Project): Not to oversimplify, but this couple, after becoming involved in countless previous entertainment ventures from busking on the Drag and Esther’s Follies to HBO series and feature films, wanted more than laughter, applause and awards. They sought, in the words of the lyricist, to know “what the world needs now.”
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The Pipkins, who make friends with just about every celebrity they meet, turned conversations with Nobel Prize winners into a documentary film, “Nobelity,” then another, “One Peace at a Time,” and a third feature film, “Building Hope.” Turk Pipkin, a veteran of movie acting and screenwriting, directed all three. Film and television pro Christy Pipkin served as producer.
What followed the movies was an expansion of the Nobelity Project into good works on the ground. Over the course of the past two decades, they have raised more than $8 million, which has enabled them to invest in hundreds of educational and conservation projects at home and abroad, while building all or part of 60 public schools in rural Kenya.
Rupert and JoAnn Carreón Reyes
Rupert Reyes and JoAnn Carreón Reyes now serve as advisers for Teatro Vivo.
Austin American-Statesman
Theater founders, producers, actors, playwrights, arts advocates (Teatro Vivo): Historically, theater has been a critical means of bilingual expression for the Chicano movement and the Latino community at large. Austin has been home to many an activist theatrical or comedy troupe, yet Rupert and JoAnn Reyes grounded their theater, not in slogans, but in the everyday lives of Mexican Americans, beautifully rendered in their many plays. They revived the revered community Christmas pageants that trace their traditions from Spain to Mexico and Texas back hundreds of years.
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While the couple stepped down from their formal roles with the troupe in 2017, they are still active in the scene. “It’s been a real labor of love and we’re happy to see the work continue,” Carreón Reyes told the Statesman.
Carolyn and Marc Seriff
Marc and Carolyn Seriff at a Long Center for the Performing Arts fundraiser.
Holly Jackson/Westlake Picayune
Patrons, arts advocates (Heller Awards for Young Artists, Summer Stock Austin, Zach Theater, et al.): There are no bigger fans of the theater than Carolyn and Marc Seriff. The co-founder of AOL and his hand-in-hand partner in artistic ardor relish sharing their theatrical adventures in New York, Austin and beyond. More than that, they become passionately involved the process of arts-making.
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On Broadway, they took up the role of co-producer and earned two Tony Awards. There’s hardly a single aspect of local theater that has escaped their interest, yet they save some of their most concentrated engagement for Zach Theater, Summer Stock Austin and the Heller Awards for Young Artists. Marc personally created the digital balloting system that allows Impact Arts to sift through some 40 area high school musicals to select winners. Yet in the end, among their most winning qualities are their warmth, kindness and zeal for life, for their family and for their community.