Posted Thu, 07/02/2009 - 2:29am
Documentary filmmaker Steven Okazaki is among the 2009 inductees to the SF State Alumni Hall of Fame. The Academy Award winner was honored at a campus ceremony May 22.
Okazaki (B.A., Cinema, ’76) earned his fourth Academy Award nomination earlier this year for the documentary short “The Conscience of Nhem En.” He won an Oscar and a Peabody Award for his 1990 short subject documentary, “Days of Waiting,” about a Caucasian artist who accompanied her Japanese American husband to a World War II internment camp. Okazaki’s “White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and won an Emmy in 2007. Other films nominated for Academy Awards were “Unfinished Business” and “The Mushroom Club.”
The other inductees to the SF State Alumni Hall of Fame this year are former football player Bill Baird and Darlene Iskra, the first woman to command a Navy ship.
The SF State Alumni Hall of Fame recognizes alumni who have earned the respect of their peers through professional, cultural and civic achievements. Previous inductees include San Francisco Food Bank Director Paul Ash, actress Annette Bening, E-LOAN Co-founder and CEO Chris Larsen, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, and physician and astronaut Yvonne Cagle.
