Meet This Year’s Winners of the Portrait of a Nation Award, Including Steven Spielberg and Temple Grandin Portraits of the honorees, who have made “transformative contributions to the United States,” will be added to the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery Filmmaker Steven Spielberg was among the 2025 recipients of the Portrait of a Nation Award. Evan Mulling / National Portrait Gallery The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has announced that it will honor four prominent Americans with the prestigious 2025 Portrait of a Nation Award. This year’s recipients are Steven Spielberg, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker; Temple Grandin, a scientist and autism advocate; Joy Harjo, the first Native American U.S. poet laureate; and Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase. “Each of the 2025 honorees were selected for their ingenuity and ability to transform their respective fields, from business and science to literature and film,” Rhea L. Combs, the gallery’s director of curatorial affairs, tells Smithsonian magazine. “By presenting their portraits, and the creativity of the artists behind them, we hope to inspire others to envision their personal power and move the needle of history in their own way.” First presented in 2015, the award recognizes individuals “who have made transformative contributions to the United States and its people across numerous fields of endeavor,” according to a statement from the gallery. Portraits of Spielberg, Grandin, Harjo and Dimon will be commissioned or acquired by the gallery in anticipation of the award gala on November 15, 2025. After going on view from November 14, 2025, to October 25, 2026, the portraits will enter the museum’s permanent collections. “This year’s honorees represent the remarkable breadth of American achievement,” Kim Sajet, the director of the museum, says in the statement. “The National Portrait Gallery is delighted to recognize these extraordinary individuals whose accomplishments embody our nation’s resilience and whose portraits will inspire visitors from across the country.” Ahead of their unveiling among the portraits of presidents, artists and other renowned Americans, take a moment to meet this year’s honorees. Steven Spielberg Steven Spielberg, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images “I dream for a living,” Spielberg once said. Fantastical films like E.T. (1982) and Jaws (1975) showcase his vivid imagination, as well as his ability to turn dreams into Hollywood blockbusters. But Spielberg also dreams about our past, and he tries to locate lessons for the future in some of history’s darkest moments. For instance, Amistad (1997) tells the story of an 1839 revolt aboard a slave ship, while Schindler’s List In Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg’s 1998 World War II epic, the director was determined “to trivialize neither the nature of war nor what it does to participants,” as Smithsonian magazine’s Kenneth Turan wrote in 2005. “Spielberg got so close to the chaos of warfare that the film led veterans who had never spoken to their children about combat to do so.” Spielberg isn’t the only director to be honored with his likeness in the National Portrait Gallery. Ava DuVernay, the esteemed filmmaker who created and directed the Martin Luther King Jr. biopic Selma (2014), won the award in 2022. She called winning “a jaw-dropping thing to me because it’s a dream I never knew to dream,” Smithsonian magazine’s Meilan Solly reported. Temple Grandin Temple Grandin, animal scientist and autism advocate Kelly Buster / National Portrait Gallery Two years after Grandin’s birth in 1947, doctors advised her parents to institutionalize their daughter, who had autism and didn’t speak until she was around 4. Her parents rejected the advice and instead placed Grandin in private schools. She flourished intellectually and hasn’t stopped since. After earning a PhD in animal science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Grandin became an authority on humane livestock treatment, designing systems that reduce stress for animals in slaughterhouses. Today, she’s also known for her autism advocacy. When she rose to prominence in the 1990s, autism was a taboo subject. But Grandin has always spoken openly about her experiences. In 2010, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. “She thinks that she and other autistic people, though they unquestionably have great problems in some areas, may have extraordinary, and socially valuable, powers in others—provided that they are allowed to be themselves, autistic,” Oliver Sacks wrote in the New Yorker Joy Harjo Joy Harjo, former U.S. poet laureate Denise Toombs / National Portrait Gallery “I had no plans to be a poet,” Harjo tells KOSU’s Sarah Liese. Growing up as a citizen of the Muscogee Nation, she knew that many other Native American students were training “for education, for medical fields, to be Native attorneys,” Harjo adds. “Poetry to everyone seemed frivolous, like it wasn’t necessary. But you come down to someone dying, you come down to falling in love, falling out of love, you come down to marriage, you come to those moments of transformation, of being tested as a human being. And poetry is there.” Harjo wrote her first volume of poetry, a nine-poem chapbook called The Last Song, in 1975. In one poem from the collection, titled “3 a.m.,” Harjo writes about “two Indians” in the Albuquerque airport “at three in the morning / trying to find a way back.” John Scarry’s description of the poem in World Literature Today as “a work filled with ghosts from the Native American past, figures seen operating in an alien culture that is itself a victim of fragmentation” applies to much of Harjo’s career. In 2019, Harjo became the first Native American to be named U.S. poet laureate. In that role, she led “Living Nations, Living Words,” a project that mapped Native poets across North America. Jamie Dimon Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase Arturo Olmos / National Portrait Gallery As the head of America’s largest bank, Dimon oversees more than $3 trillion in assets across the world. Born in Queens, New York, in 1956, he began a career in investment banking after graduating from Harvard Business School. “He just outworks everybody,” Duff McDonald, the author of Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase, explained in a 2009 interview with the Chase Alumni Association. After becoming CEO of the bank in 2006, Dimon rose to prominence as he steered it through the Great Recession. “The only brand that came out of this thing undamaged was Chase,” McDonald said. Other business and finance leaders honored with the Portrait of a Nation Award include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, who were selected in 2019. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.