Spotlight
City Parks Foundation will honor Joe Killian and Alex Blavatnik at its 2026 dinner and concert benefit on September 10 at Rumsey Playfield, SummerStage’s flagship venue in Central Park. Killian, who founded SummerStage in 1986, will receive the SummerStage Icon Award in recognition of his vision to bring free performing arts programming to New Yorkers. Alex Blavatnik, chairman of Access Industries and senior advisor to the Blavatnik Family Foundation, will receive the City Parks Foundation Icon Award. The award recognizes his and the Foundation’s longstanding support for preserving cultural history and making it freely accessible to the public. Preservation Hall Jazz Band will perform at the benefit, with additional guests to be announced. The event coincides with SummerStage’s 40th anniversary and celebrates City Parks Foundation’s continuing role in presenting free music, art, and culture across New York City.
A Financial Times article explores the little-known wartime history of Trent Park, the North London estate where British intelligence secretly monitored captured senior German officers. Their unguarded conversations yielded vital intelligence about the Holocaust, the Wehrmacht’s involvement in mass murder, the development of V2 rockets, and divisions within the German military. The operation depended on teams of German-speaking listeners, many of them Jewish refugees, who recorded and transcribed discussions from concealed rooms beneath the house. Now opening to the public as the House of Secrets museum, Trent Park brings this history to life through restored interiors, archival materials, and exhibitions focused on those who carried out the intelligence work. The museum also preserves the stories of individuals whose contributions remained classified for decades. The Blavatnik Family Foundation is proud to support this important institution and its work to deepen public understanding of wartime intelligence, courage, and remembrance.
The documentary Noga, which premiered at the 2026 Tribeca Festival, follows Israeli musician Noga Erez at a defining moment in her life and career. Directed by Jono and Benji Bergmann, the film traces Erez’s work and relationship with her partner and collaborator, Ori Rousso, as they record, tour, and build an international audience. The October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza transform the course of the film, bringing grief, uncertainty, online abuse, cultural boycotts, and pressure to take public positions into their creative and personal lives. Even as those pressures intensify, Erez and Rousso continue making music and performing, using their work to process events around them while sustaining a demanding partnership. Supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, with Leonard Blavatnik serving as Executive Producer, Noga examines the intertwined questions of art, politics, identity, and responsibility.
The Blavatnik Family Foundation is supporting DRONE, a new multimedia crime thriller appearing at the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Written and directed by Dmitry Melkin and performed by Gladstone Mahib, the one-person production explores artificial intelligence, desire, betrayal, and the changing boundary between people and machines. The Foundation’s support is helping Melkin, who left Russia because of his opposition to the war in Ukraine, return to the Fringe for the first time since presenting the critically acclaimed The Forest in 2019. The production also reflects longstanding connections within the international theatre community. Mahib trained at the Moscow Art Theatre, where actor Brian Cox taught exchange students, and his son, Alan Cox, will make a guest appearance.
Providing many of the world's best researchers, scientists, and universities with support, and funding to discover breakthroughs that solve humankind's greatest challenges.
The Foundation contributes to renowned institutions that showcase the breadth of arts and culture, including performance, exhibition and education.
The Blavatnik Archive is a nonprofit foundation dedicated to preserving and disseminating materials that contribute to the study of 20th-century Jewish and world history, with a special emphasis on World War I, World War II, and Soviet Russia.
