The Milley Awards Executive Committee and the City of Mill Valley proudly announce the five honorees for the 2025 Creative Achievement Award—The Milley. They are Jerry Harrison, Irene Belknap, Joyce Kleiner, Jeff Brown, and Jim Welte. These Mill Valley residents with distinguished accomplishments in the arts and service to the community will be honored at the 34th Milley Awards dinner on Sunday, October 26, 2025, at the Mill Valley Community Center.
In addition to the five Milley honorees, the semi-annual Vera Schultz Award will be presented to Seager Gray Gallery for outstanding support of artists and the arts.
Jerry Harrison
Achievement in the Musical Arts
Admired for his work as a musician and a music producer, Mill Valley resident Jerry Harrison embodies the very nature of the spirit of the Milley Awards. He is a creator, collaborator and entrepreneur who has made an impact both locally and globally. Jerry was a member of the bands Modern Lovers and Talking Heads, which was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002 and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. A keyboardist and guitarist, Jerry has released solo albums of his own and has produced some of rock and roll’s best-known bands.
Irene Belknap
Achievement in the Visual Arts
Irene Belknap has been an integral member of the Mill Valley arts community for over fifty years. A gifted painter whose lush, surreal canvases of women, men and animals in motion are both lucid and dreamlike, Irene’s work has a presence that embraces and transports the viewer. Like hieroglyphs, the paintings are accompanied by words and written characters. The titles of her series, such as “String Theory,” and “Dressed in Words” are plays on words and explorations of themes. She regularly shows at O’Hanlon Center for the Arts and most recently showed fourteen of her giclée prints at the Redwoods.
Joyce Kleiner
Achievement in the Literary Arts
Journalist Joyce Kleiner is the author of two books and countless articles about Mill Valley, her home town since 1995. A meticulous researcher, she loves to lift layers of history to reveal much about the known and unknown men, women and events that have shaped our special place. Her books, Legendary Locals of Mill Valley (2014) profiled more than a hundred movers and shakers; and Kind of Close to Heaven (2021), a compendium of her columns in the Mill Valley Herald, educated and informed readers. Joyce is currently writing vignettes for MV Connect, the City of Mill Valley’s primary online vehicle to communicate to its citizenry.
Jeff Brown
Achievement in the Performing Arts
Jeff Brown has a larger-than-life presence in the Tamalpais Valley Community Services District. For the past seven years the Mill Valley resident has been author, director and technical designer of The Rhubarb Revue, an annual comedy revue that raises funds for the Tam Valley Improvement Club. For six of those years he also has worked on the annual Tam Valley Murder Mystery—directing, building sets, handling props and lights, acting, even developing special effects. During the summers he provides technical assistance for the Tam Valley community’s Creekside Fridays, a nine-week free concert series; during Halloween he creates ingenious technical illusions for the community’s Haunted House. These are just some of his projects. Jeff’s talent, creativity, enthusiasm and generous nature are legendary in Tamalpais Valley.
Jim Welte
Contributions to the Arts Community
Through prodigious storytelling skills and as co-founder of the Mill Valley Music Festival, Mill Valley Chamber Executive Director Jim Welte contributes in multiple ways to our community’s creative life. In 2010 as newspapers languished, he launched and managed Mill Valley Patch, a news and information site, covering the local community with depth and accuracy. As longtime editor of the Enjoy Mill Valley blog, website and newsletter, Jim shines a bright light on artists, arts events, iconic institutions and nonprofits and the City’s Arts Commission and Library. He has a discerning eye for what’s important and is highly responsive to requests from artists, event organizers and organizations wishing to inform the community of their activities. In these and many other ways Jim is a vital contributor to Mill Valley arts.
Seager Gray Gallery
Vera Schultz Award
The Vera Schultz Award, bestowed by the Milley Executive Committee, was created in 2002 to honor the achievements of organizations that embody the late Marin County Supervisor Vera Schultz’s activism, leadership, courage and vision. This year Seager Gray Gallery is honored. Donna Seager and Suzanne Gray ran their art gallery in downtown Mill Valley from 2011 until early this year. It was for both a satisfying creative endeavor. In their shows the whole was greater than the sum of its parts and a gallery was not just a shop that sold wares, but a space to provide an experience of art that enlightened and enriched the community.
Suzanne and Donna will each receive a hand-calligraphed artwork by East Bay calligrapher Jody Meese.
Additional Information on the Milleys 2025:
The Milley Award is a bronze statuette created by the late sculptor John Libberton of Sausalito. The event is produced by a volunteer committee under the auspices of the Mill Valley Arts Commission. 2025 Executive Committee members are Abby Wasserman, Queenie Taylor, Daniel Patrick, Rosemary MacConnell, Audrey Donaldson, Roy Forest, Larry “the Hat” Lautzker, Dana Kelly and Jackie La Lanne. The Milley honorees are selected by a changing panel of judges from the community.
Tickets for the 2025 Milley Awards are $100. The entry includes appetizers, complimentary wine and other beverages, a catered buffet dinner and the awards program, which will feature videos, speeches and a live musical performance. Tickets will go on sale September 7, 2025 through the website www.milleyawards.org.
The Milley Executive Committee would like to give a huge Thank You to this year‘s judges for giving of their valuable time and expertise. We deeply appreciated it!
The honorees were chosen by five judges from the Mill Valley community, all distinguished in the arts:
Joe Angiulo, coordinator
Maria Hoppe
Zach Gilmour
Paul Liberatore
Steve McNamara
Michael Vogel
The volunteer judging panel changes each year.