The Norman Corwin Award Committee, in conjunction with the National Audio Theatre Festivals, is proud to announce that Susan Albert Loewenberg has been named the recipient of the 2026 Norman Corwin Award for Excellence in Audio Theatre.
Susan Albert Loewenberg is the Founder and Producing Director of L.A. Theatre Works (LATW) https://latw.org/. Under her visionary leadership, LATW has curated the largest library of audio plays in the world, preserving classic and contemporary drama for global
audiences. In this capacity, Loewenberg serves as the Executive Producer of their syndicated radio series, broadcast nationwide on NPR stations. Her work has been honored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Publishers Weekly, and many others. A Sarah Lawrence College graduate, her distinguished career spans beyond the recording studio and stage as a contributor to the Los Angeles Times and American Theatre Magazine, and a board member of the Center for Public Integrity. During the Clinton Administration, Susan also served on the Board of Federal Prison Industries, a presidential appointment, and on the regional panel of the President's Commission on White House Fellows.
We are proud to recognize Susan's accomplishments, and especially her role in creating so much truly excellent audio theatre, which Corwin himself greatly admired.
Audio Theatre is a broad term for the most fully developed form of storytelling through sound. It combines performance by actors with sound effects and music and may be presented live or recorded in studios or on location. Originating i
n audio recordings in the nineteenth century, it reached a global audience in the twentieth century, when it became widely known as radio theatre or radio drama. Today, while it is performed live in many places and remains a part of radio broadcasting, audio theatre especially thrives through recorded formats, especially online as downloads and podcasts.
The Norman Corwin Award, established on May 3, 2010, on the 100th birthday of Norman Corwin, is always announced on his birthday. The first Award was given to Mr. Corwin himself, whose amazing career started in the 1930s and extended into the 21st Century. He is regarded as the Poet Laureate of Radio and the Grand Master of American Radio Theatre, as his work in that medium is unsurpassed. The award, the premier American recognition for lifetime achievement in the art, will be presented to
Susan in person on June 27, 2026, during NATF’s Pringle Audio Fiction Festival in Columbia, Missouri. More information is available at https://www.natf.org/.
Loewenberg joins an elite group of past recipients of the Corwin Award, including Tom Lopez, Peggy Webber, Yuri Rasovsky, The Firesign Theatre (Philip Austion, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, Philip Proctor), and Erik Bauersfeld, with Legacy Awards to Himan Brown, and Stan Freberg, and Orson Welles.
