ALTOONA – British actor and director Harry Burton will receive the Kjell Meling Award for Distinction in the Arts and Humanities on Nov. 21, at 7 p.m. in the Wolf Kuhn Theatre of the Misciagna Family Center for Performing Arts. The award ceremony includes a lecture by Burton and will be followed by a dessert reception.
As an actor, Burton has regularly appeared on the West End stage in a host of celebrated productions. He has appeared on British television and has performed in four feature films, including Agent Cody Banks II and Blackwood.
As a director, Burton has enjoyed renown for his West End productions of Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter’s The Lover and The Dumb Waiter. He also directed Eric Daniels’ Where I Come From, the first African-American play to be staged at the Kentucky Repertory Theatre. His most recent stage directorial credits include François Archambault’s The Leisure Society and Ross Ericson’s Casualties. In September, Burton directed Clive Exton’s Barking in Essex at the West End’s Wyndham’s Theatre. Burton has directed two BBC film productions and recently worked as associate producer on A Thousand Years of Joy, a documentary directed by Haydn Reiss about the life of American poet Robert Bly.
Penn State Altoona initiated the Meling Award in 2006 to honor the memory of its longtime associate dean for Academic Affairs, who passed away in 2005. The award is intended to memorialize Meling’s love of literature and language and his unwavering support as an administrator for the development of Penn State Altoona’s faculty as scholars and artists.
