SANTA FE, NM.- The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s Women of Distinction Series is pleased to announce the recipient of its 2009 award. The Series honors O’Keeffe’s legacy of achievement annually by recognizing contemporary women who have made outstanding contributions to our society and culture. The 2009 Series honors Gloria Steinem, a leading writer, lecturer, editor and feminist activist. The award and lecture will take place on

March 7, 2009 at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center at 7 PM and coincides with International Women’s Day. Proceeds from the event benefit the Museum’s Art and Leadership Program for Girls.

The Women of Distinction Series, established in 2007 during the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s 10th Anniversary Celebration, was established to honor women like Georgia O’Keeffe, who have effectively realized themselves as women and professionals. O’Keeffe was unique both in the way she made art and how she lived her life. She once said: “I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other ways--things that I had no words for.” Past honorees have included Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and journalist Gail Sheehy.

Steinem is making an equally unique contribution to our culture and promoting a world in which,” as she has stated, “There are no roles other than those chosen or those earned.” As a writer, lecturer, editor, and feminist activist, she travels nationally and internationally as an organizer and lecturer and is a frequent media spokeswoman on issues of equality. She is the founder and original publisher of Ms. Magazine, helped found the Women's Action Alliance, a pioneering national information center that specializes in nonsexist, multiracial children's education, as well as the National Women's Political Caucus, a group that works to advance the numbers of pro-equality women in elected and appointed office at a national and state level.

Proceeds from this event will support the Museum’s Art and Leadership Program for Girls. Over the past eleven years, the nationally recognized, award-winning program has reached over 2,000 girls through summer intensives, as well as school and afterschool workshops. Youth identified as low-income, and/or facing at-risk issues, with a core interest in the arts are nominated by their teachers. The multi-disciplinary programming includes workshops in the literary, performing and visual arts, while using Georgia O’Keeffe as an artistic role model.

Gloria Steinem is a writer, lecturer, editor, and feminist activist. She travels in this and other countries as an organizer and lecturer and is a frequent media spokeswoman on issues of equality. She is particularly interested in the shared origins of sex and race caste systems, gender roles and child abuse as roots of violence, non-violent conflict resolution, the cultures of indigenous peoples, and organizing across boundaries for peace and justice.

In 1972, she co-founded Ms. Magazine, and remained one of its editors for fifteen years. She continues to serve as a consulting editor for Ms., and was instrumental in the magazine's recent move to join and be published by the Feminist Majority Foundation. In 1968, she had helped to found New York magazine, where she was a political columnist and wrote feature articles. As a freelance writer, she was published in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and women's magazines as well as for publications in other countries. She has produced a documentary on child abuse for HBO, a feature film about the death penalty for Lifetime, and been the subject of profiles on Lifetime and Showtime.

Her books include the bestsellers Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Moving Beyond Words, and Marilyn: Norma Jean, on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Her writing also appears in many anthologies and textbooks, and she was an editor of Houghton Mifflin's The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History.

Ms. Steinem helped to found the Women's Action Alliance, a pioneering national information center that specialized in nonsexist, multiracial children's education, and the National Women's Political Caucus, a group that continues to work to advance the numbers of pro-equality women in elected and appointed office at a national and state level. She was president and co-founder of Voters for Choice, a pro-choice political action committee for twenty-five years, then with the Planned Parenthood Action Fund when it merged with VFC for the 2004 elections. She was also co-founder and serves on the board of Choice USA, a national organization that supports young pro-choice leadership and works to preserve comprehensive sex education in schools. She was the founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, a national multi-racial, multi-issue fund that supports grassroots projects to empower women and girls, and also a founder of its Take Our Daughters to Work Day, a first national day devoted to girls that has now become an institution here and in other countries. Now, she is working with the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College on a project to document the grassroots origins of the U.S. women's movement.

As a writer, Ms. Steinem has received the Penney-Missouri Journalism Award, the Front Page and Clarion awards, National Magazine awards, an Emmy Citation for excellence in television writing, the Women's Sports Journalism Award, the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Writers Award from the United Nations, and most recently, the University of Missouri School of Journalism Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism.

She also received the first Doctorate of Human Justice awarded by Simmons College, the Bill of Rights Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the National Gay Rights Advocates Award, the Liberty award of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Ceres Medal from the United Nations, and a number of honorary degrees. Parenting magazine selected her for its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995 for her work in promoting girls' self-esteem, and Biography magazine listed her as one of the 25 most influential women in America. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. She has been the subject of two biographical television documentaries, and The Education of a Woman, a biography written by Carolyn Heilbrun.

In 1993, her concern with child abuse led her to co-produce and narrate an Emmy Award winning TV documentary for HBO, "Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories." With Rosilyn Heller, she also co-produced an original 1993 TV movie for Lifetime, "Better Off Dead," which examined the parallel forces that both oppose abortion and support the death penalty.

Ms. Steinem graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College in 1956, and then spent two years in India on a Chester Bowles Fellowship. She wrote for Indian publications, and was influenced by Gandhian activism.

She has served on the board of trustees of Smith College, as well as the boards of other non-profit and educational foundations. She was a member of the Beyond Racism Initiative, a three-year effort on the part of activists and experts from South Africa, Brazil and the United States to compare the racial patterns of those three countries and to learn cross-nationally.

She now lives in New York City, and is currently at work on Road to the Heart: America As if Everyone Mattered, a book about her more than thirty years on the road as a feminist organizer. She is also writing for other books and publications and recently co-founded the Women's Media Center.