Viola Davis will be honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2025 Golden Globes

Hollywood is already preparing for next 12 months’s awards season. On Wednesday, the Golden Globes announced that actress, producer and former Golden Globe winner Viola Davis will receive the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2025 awards ceremony. Created in honor of famed director Cecil B. DeMille in 1952, the eponymous award is a prestigious honor celebrating the outstanding contributions of a few of Hollywood’s best talents.

“Viola Davis is a luminary whose profound talent continually changes the perspective through which we view and understand film,” said Helen Hoehne, president of the Golden Globes, in a press release shared with theGrio. “Awarding her the 2025 Cecil B. DeMille Award is not only an honor, but an expression of our admiration for her unwavering dedication to her craft and her monumental impact on the industry. Viola’s courage in portraying complex, powerful characters broke barriers and forged new paths, making her a symbol of excellence and the ideal recipient of this prestigious award.”

Viola Davis won her first Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Denzel Washington’s Fences (2016). She later won a SAG Award and an Oscar for this role. As of 2024, she holds the record for the most Oscar nominations for a Black woman in history. Similarly, Davis became the third Black woman and 18th person to attain EGOT status after winning a Grammy Award in 2023.

Previously honored by Time100 for her influence and the General Counsel’s William O Douglas Award for her commitment to social justice, Davis’s work extends beyond entertainment, serving as an activist, philanthropist and New York Times bestselling writer. In 2012, Davis and her husband Julius Tennon founded the production company JuVee Productions with the mission of giving a voice to the voiceless through powerful, impactful storytelling. Creating scripted and unscripted television, film, documentary, theater and digital immersive content for audiences around the world, JuVee strives to be at the forefront of innovation while developing and producing a library of socially relevant entertainment defined by inclusion.

As the 2025 recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award, Davis joins a gaggle of 69 honorees, including Black stars resembling Morgan Freeman, Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Oprah Winfrey and Eddie Murphy.

The full list of 2025 Golden Globe nominees will be announced on December 9; The awards ceremony will be broadcast on January 5.