Arts & Entertainment >>

• Best Mystery/Thriller Writer
  J.T. Ellison
  A former White House staffer, Ellison moved to Nashville and began writing stories about serial killers. As it turns out, that beats the hell out of moving here for a career in country music. She's set two wildly successful books in Music City (All the Pretty Girls and 14) and credits the Metro... More >>
• Best New Theater Space
  Belmont's Troutt Theater/Black Box Theater 
  Nashville Children's Theatre's $6.3 million renovation was a major (and historic) local development, but for high impact and versatility, the opening of Belmont University's new facility gets the gold star. Not only is the Troutt a lovely multipurpose venue in a hip part of town, but it... More >>
• Best Professional Theater
  Tennessee Repertory Theatre
  Arthur Miller's The Crucible, a radio-drama version of It's a Wonderful Life, Edward Albee's The Goat, John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, Steve Martin's The Underpants—every show the Rep produced in the past year bespoke the highest professionalism and serious intent, even when the material... More >>
• Best Newcomers
  Cynthia Tucker and Darius Willis
  Tucker took on some edgy roles in two Actors Bridge Ensemble productions, A Bright Room Called Day and Marisol, and she exhibited strong stage presence and a natural gift for pushing the limits of character work. As for Willis, he made an excellent first impression in the Sista Style... More >>
• Best Stage Show Suitable for Both Children and Adults
  Go, Dog. Go!
  Julee Baber's direction, Misty Lewis' choreography, Mitch Massaro's set, Patricia Taber's costumes—all contributed to the complete all-ages success of this Nashville Children's Theatre production, in which anthropomorphized dogs sang, played and otherwise romped up a highly entertaining... More >>
• Best One-Man Show (1 Comment)
  Mark Cabus
  Cabus directs—but he acts, too. Those who availed themselves of his limited-run performance in Doug Wright's solo piece, I Am My Own Wife, witnessed one of Nashville's most accomplished thespians successfully enacting literally dozens of roles. Utilizing sharply differentiated vocal... More >>
• Best Shakespeare (1 Comment)
  Romeo and Juliet, TSU
  In a year that frequently gave good Bard—Hamlet and Coriolanus from Nashville Shakespeare Featival, Naked Stages' The Merchant of Venice, Actors Bridge's Much Ado About Nothing—there was simply something singularly exciting about Barry Scott's modern reworking of the tragic love... More >>
• Best Improv Company
  Improv Nashville
  Improv is on the upswing in Nashville, and much of that is due to the tenacious spirit of this three-year-old company. Its dedicated young execs have maintained consistency in their performance schedule, and their training program continues to develop new talent. Only recently, the company... More >>
• Best Actress (3 Comments)
  Ruth Cordell
  Cordell, a veteran TV and stage actress, recently returned to the Middle Tennessee area. She could've gained this honor solely for her appearance in The Goat at Tennessee Rep. As the aggrieved wife of a man who's taken a goat for a lover, she masterfully navigated a thicket of pain and betrayal,... More >>
• Best Actor (1 Comment)
  Kamal Bolden
  Bolden emerged from the burgeoning local African American theater community with a big year on the stages of the city's most established companies. After starring as Jackie Robinson in Most Valuable Player at Nashville Children's Theatre, Bolden distinguished himself in multiple roles in a... More >>
• Best Director
  Mark Cabus
  Fortuitous circumstances placed the multitalented Cabus in charge of Shakespeare in the Park's recent production of Coriolanus. Outdoor surroundings can be less than ideal, but Cabus' brawny staging made for robust, vibrant political drama that strongly showcased veteran and up-and-coming... More >>
• Best Poetry Volume
  Epistles, Mark Jarman
  Over the course of the last 100 years, a century of increasing agnosticism, most serious American poets stopped mediating their search for meaning through religion. Not so for Mark Jarman, whose ninth collection, Epistles, contains 30 prose poems based loosely on the epistles of St. Paul. Since... More >>
• Best Gender Bender (2 Comments)
  Eric Tichenor 
  Tichenor's on-again/off-again local acting career found him recently in funnyman roles at Chaffin's Barn. Then director Ross Brooks cast him in the lead in the fall '07 People's Branch Theatre production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. As an East German rock singer who undergoes a botched... More >>
• Best New Theater Company
  FuseBox Theatre
  With sheer moxie and a savvy approach to its Internet presence (including YouTube videos), this group of improvisers—many of them renegades from Improv Nashville—started up at the turn of the new year. Since then, they've drawn bigger and bigger crowds at Cafe Coco and Bongo After... More >>
• Best College Theater Program
  Belmont University 
  It certainly helps to have a beautiful new theater facility. But Belmont has been turning out talented actors and musical performers for a good while, including Blue Man Group's Christopher Brown (the star of recent local productions of Coriolanus and Much Ado About Nothing) and American Idol's... More >>
• Best Taboo-Busting Production
  The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?
  Playwright Edward Albee delivered an address at Vanderbilt last fall, then a few months later Tennessee Rep mounted the Nashville premiere of his contentious and challenging examination of the boundaries of acceptable societal behavior. The Rep's production was classy, with fine... More >>
• Best New Puppet Troupe
  Mechanical Animals Puppet Caravan
  If you hadn't heard of them before this past June's Nashville International Puppet Festival, you're forgiven. But Nashville's own Adrian Brown and Lon Chaney (yes, related to that one, if you're wondering) represented our city like 50-foot Emily Dickinsons at that festival, standing alongside... More >>
• Best Opera
  Elmer Gantry
  Not every town can host a major world-premiere opera, but Nashville Opera's John Hoomes made it happen. The results were theatrically sublime and historically significant for the local arts scene. Robert Aldridge and Herschel Garfein's opus, based on Sinclair Lewis' 1927 novel, was 17 years in... More >>
• Best Workshopped New Musical
  21 Baker Road
  Jim Reyland and Addison Gore's thoughtful, fanciful work about family and the important things in life had been sitting in the authors' trunk looking for a home. Then they decided to mount it DIY-style, in an elaborate staged read-and-sing at the Troutt Theater, directed by Barry Scott. With... More >>
• Best Musical Performance
  Ginger Newman
  Younger local performers Ashley Bishop and Brooke Bryant did some fine singing onstage this past year, but for sheer chutzpah and mature mastery of craft, you couldn't beat Newman in Naked Stages' production of Souvenir. Her portrayal of tone-deaf novelty act Florence Foster Jenkins, the Mrs.... More >>
• Best Classical Program for the Masses
  All-Gershwin Evening, Nashville Symphony Orchestra
  A clever ad campaign positions NSO maestro Giancarlo Guerrero as a merry civic icon and man of the people, conducting fountains for kids at the Bicentennial Mall (on a rare day they were working), a honky-tonk band on Lower Broad and a dominoes game at La Hacienda. But the NSO's sold-out season... More >>
• Best Novel by a Nashvillian
  The Blue Star, Tony Earley
  Each year, patches of quiet farm-town life grow smaller, but Tony Earley still dwells in that old Southern world—even if he has to go back half a century or more to write about it. His first novel, Jim the Boy, renders rural 1934 North Carolina through the eyes of a 10-year-old struggling... More >>
• Best Film Programming
  Belcourt Theatre
  Remember a decade ago when we used to look at the awesome independent movie theaters in other cities—the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, the Music Box in Chicago, Film Forum in New York—and wish we had one? Now we do, and the greatest thing about the city's last historic theater (besides... More >>
• Best Free Film Programming
  Nashville Public Library
  Hidden in plain sight on the downtown library's shelves is a movie nut's dream: a treasure trove of DVD/VHS rarities ranging from William Greaves' fascinating documentary experiment Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One to the exploits of Mexican Z-movie wrestling hero Santos, all ready for checkout.... More >>
• Best Improved Film Programming
  Sarratt Cinema
  Here it is, folks: the cheapest movie date in town, and maybe the best. Nimbly recusing itself from the art-movie dogfight at Green Hills, where one to four poorly promoted films a week maul each other for no audience—adios, Baghead, Frozen River and My Blueberry Nights—Vanderbilt's... More >>
• Best Environmentally Friendly Gallery
  Nashville's Smallest Art Gallery
  Despite this art space's unique presentation—because of it?—many Nashvillians have walked right past the 120-square-inch gallery in Hillsboro Village. However, this humble showing space illuminated by a single solar-powered light makes two statements that are hard to ignore. First,... More >>
• Best Installation
  Erika Johnson, "Curtain," Parthenon
  One sign you aren't in New York: No one puts up the millions of dollars to fabricate massive artworks out of tons of metal. So the locals have to make do with humble materials or a humble scale. Opting for an ambitious scope, Erika Johnson filled a long gallery in the Parthenon with a serpentine... More >>
• Best Locally Originated Show
  Oswaldo Guayasamin, Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery
  Nashville is usually on the receiving end of traveling shows, but the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery flipped roles when they organized a survey of this Ecuadorean artist. Fired by a fierce social consciousness, Guayasamin created palpable, animated figures, but he is not very well remembered... More >>
• Best Interactive Work
  Libby Rowe, "Learning Feminine: Posture," Belmont's Leu Art Gallery
  All pink and frilly, Rowe's solo show set up a Sisyphean game in the context of Miss Manners. Viewers were invited to don pink pumps and walk across the floor carrying a teacup and saucer on their head. Most of the time the cup would drop and break, and you either repeated this until you... More >>
• Best Support for Student Artists
  Future/Now, The Frist Center
  Being an art student in Nashville can be rough. If you aren't out there putting on your own guerilla art shows, it's difficult to launch yourself or (more importantly) your work into the gallery scene. So kudos to the Frist for recognizing, and validating, the young talent emerging from local... More >>
• Best Next Classical Superstar
  Parker Ramsay
  Imagine a British racer taking the Winston Cup, or a kilted Scot becoming quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys. It's probably just as hard for the British to imagine a Yank becoming the Organ Scholar at King's College, Cambridge—the accompanist for the world-renowned King's College Choir,... More >>
• Best Drawing Exhibit
  Erin Plew, "Blackthorn: This is the season..."
  Birds make great subjects for drawing, their feathers offering endless opportunity to indulge in the fine detail pencil allows. Erin Plew turned in a virtuosic performance this year with a drawing in which birds of all sorts explode into the picture space, jumbling on top of each other. She used... More >>
• Best Exploding Whale
  Jack Ryan, "Blue Skies: Thar She Blows," Tennessee Arts Commission
  Like a cargo container washing up to isolated people on a Pacific Island, the YouTube video of an ill-fated 1970s attempt to move a whale carcass off an Oregon beach came as a gift from the gods to Jack Ryan. The authorities decided to use explosives to push it out to sea, but they inadvertently... More >>
• Best Romance/Horror Writer
  Sherrilyn Kenyon
  Kenyon's campy Dark Hunter series is the hottest thing going in the romance-horror genre. Though her lusty bloodsuckers are more Brooklyn hipster than Brentwood homemaker, Kenyon herself resembles the latter. A married mother of three, she still makes time to serve as room mother for her son's... More >>
• Best Art Blog
  Perambulating the Bounds
  Perambulating most literally means to walk through, and Scene art critic and local art advocate David Maddox uses his blog to do just that—to meander through the city's art offerings like a well-heeled flaneur. The blog functions as a space to share his thoughts in a slightly informal... More >>
• Best Surprisingly Confrontational Art
  David Lipscomb Students, Future/Now
  Lipscomb's reputation as a school of orthodox religious views might suggest that its art students hew to a pretty narrow line. But when their work went up alongside that of other students at the Frist, it wasn't piety that came across but bratty combativeness. Two of them dove into the turbulent... More >>
• Best Use of Unorthodox Materials
  Lauren Kalman
  Lauren Kalman's video/sculpture installation at Cheekwood last spring, Corpus, Figure, Skate, was a poignant exploration of women's relationships with their bodies, and she chose a surprisingly apt material to convey her theme: sheets of lead. The metal's multiple identities as insidious poison,... More >>
• Best Arcade Gallery
  Twist Gallery
  Back in 2006, opening a gallery and art boutique in Nashville's underused, picturesque downtown Arcade was a smart move by local artist Beth Gilmore and art consultant Caroline Carlisle—and it looks even smarter now that hip singles are moving back downtown. Other galleries have since come... More >>
• Best Art Community Energizer (6 Comments)
  Andee Rudloff
  Possibly one of the busiest artists in town, Andee Rudloff is more common at the city's art functions than Merlot. Even while working as educator for outreach at the Frist Center and regularly collaborating with artists in Nashville and Paducah, Ky., she not only manages to attend all the local... More >>
• Best Art and Lecture Series
  Dialogues at Zeitgeist
  In an art scene where nearly everyone bemoans the need for more education—what art is, how it's made, how it can be understood—Zeitgeist Gallery's Janice Zeitlin and Lain York put the rubber to the road this year with their provocative multi-part series of gallery shows and lectures.... More >>
• Best Opportunity for a Heist
  Fabergé, Cheekwood
  If you're looking for that big score—and an opportunity to don the black beret that's been neglected at the back of your closet—grab your bag of tricks and head out to Cheekwood: There's Fabergé to be had. The Belle Meade museum is currently home to the Matilda Geddings Gray... More >>
• Best Nashville True Crime Author
  Mike Glasgow
  For those seeking contact with Nashville's id, Mike Glasgow is an obliging guide. His first book Unfinished Canvas, written with Phyllis Gobbell, traces the Perry March debacle. The Bridge, his second title, tells the story of Eric Volz, the Nashvillian falsely accused of murder in Nicaragua.... More >>
• Best Knitting Wit (3 Comments)
  Ann Shayne
  Local author and former BookPage editor Shayne is the best cultural ambassador Nashville could ever have—at least if the culture in question involves long needles and woolly booties. As the Southern voice in Mason-Dixon Knitting (masondixonknitting.com)—a blog covering all things... More >>
• Best Local Cookbook
  Around the Opry Table, Kay West
  The best cookbooks aren't just instruction manuals: They sum up a whole way of life using food as a prism or organizing principle. Between Johnny Cash's mother's recipe for Scripture Cake—written entirely in code derived from Bible citations—and Dierks Bentley's for paella, the... More >>
• Best Incentive for Local Writers
  The Parthenon Prize
  Bring your manuscript! The third annual Parthenon Prize is offering a $15,000 winner-take-all award for fiction writing. In the face of all the doom-saying about the decline of fiction and of print literature in general, the prize was created two years ago by local businessman and book-lover... More >>
• Best Original Plays
  Joseph Giordano 
  Religion and Rubber Ducks, Giordano's collection of short works, received a surprisingly lively production at the atmospheric new Ovvio Arte gallery space. Good performances and snappy direction by Lauren Shouse brought to life the author's quirky insights into relationships and religious... More >>
• Best New Creative Space
  Ovvio Arte
  Removed from the hipness of Hillsboro Village and the doings downtown, the Chestnut Street neighborhood has hosted some of the city's most challenging creative voices. With the opening of Ovvio Arte, even the most obscure expressions now have an official address. Veta Cicolello and Theo... More >>