Taylor Swift to receive Hollywood Reporter's Sherry Lansing Leadership Award

The Hollywood Reporter said Wednesday that Taylor Swift will receive this year's Sherry Lansing Leadership Award, the top honor at the trade publication's annual Women in Entertainment gala. Director Greta Gerwig is set to present the award, according to the announcement, which arrived alongside the magazine's Women in Entertainment issue and its closely watched Power 100 list of the industry's most influential women.

The news was independently reported the same day by the entertainment site Showbiz411, which cited The Hollywood Reporter's own statement. The honor adds a business-and-leadership credential to a year in which Swift has already collected recognition from music's own institutions. In February, the body representing the global recorded-music industry named her its biggest-selling global artist for a sixth time, a record no other act has matched, citing worldwide sales across streaming, downloads and physical formats tied to her 2025 album and tour documentary. The Hollywood Reporter's award, by contrast, is not a sales or chart prize. It is given annually to a single honoree the magazine judges to have exercised outsized influence and control within the entertainment business itself, a category that has previously gone to studio executives, directors and philanthropists as often as to performers.

An award named for a studio-system pioneer

The Sherry Lansing Leadership Award is named for the executive who, in 1980, became the first woman to run a major Hollywood studio when she was named president of 20th Century Fox. She went on to serve as chairman and chief executive of Paramount Pictures from 1992 to 2005, a run that included "Titanic," "Forrest Gump" and "Braveheart," before leaving the job to found a cancer-research philanthropy that now bears her name, according to the Sherry Lansing Foundation's own biography of its founder.

The Hollywood Reporter has attached Lansing's name to the leadership prize at its Women in Entertainment breakfast for close to two decades, and recent recipients form a list heavy with both performers and executives: Gwyneth Paltrow in 2025, Nicole Kidman in 2024 and Adele in 2023, alongside earlier honorees including Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lawrence, Shonda Rhimes and Oprah Winfrey. The gala itself, typically held in Los Angeles in early December, doubles as the publication's showcase for its Power 100 ranking and has in past years drawn several hundred studio and network executives, agents and talent to a single breakfast program. This year's event is sponsored by Lifetime as founding sponsor and the pharmaceutical company Lilly as title sponsor, the announcement said, continuing a pattern of outside sponsorship that has funded the gala and an affiliated mentorship program for Los Angeles high school students for years.

A year of leverage and record sales

Swift's selection follows a stretch in which she has repeatedly been held up, including by her own industry's trade press, as a case study in an artist accumulating unusual control over her own business. In May 2025 she announced that she had bought back the master recordings of her first six albums, ending a six-year dispute that began when the catalog was sold without her consent, first to Scooter Braun's Ithaca Holdings and then to the investment firm Shamrock Capital. The purchase came after Swift spent several years re-recording those albums as "Taylor's Version" releases, a project widely credited with giving her the commercial leverage and fan loyalty to eventually negotiate the buyback herself rather than wait for the rights to revert.

That history is directly relevant to the kind of award The Hollywood Reporter is making: a prize for leadership and leverage inside the business, not simply for creative or chart success. Swift's twelfth studio album, "The Life of a Showgirl," released in October 2025, sold roughly 4 million equivalent units in the United States in its first week, breaking a decade-old first-week sales record previously held by Adele's "25," according to tracking data reported by Billboard and the music data firm Luminate. The album's performance, combined with the ongoing fallout from her concert-film and documentary releases, has kept Swift near the top of year-end industry rankings even outside awards season proper.

Part of a broader push on women's influence in Hollywood

The Women in Entertainment franchise sits inside a broader, long-running effort by entertainment trade press to track and promote women's advancement in an industry where executive suites, studio chairmanships and financing decisions have remained disproportionately male even as box-office and streaming hits increasingly come from women directors, showrunners and stars. The accompanying Power 100 list, published each December, ranks the women the magazine judges most influential across film, television, music and digital media, from studio chiefs to talent managers to recording executives.

Honoring a musician rather than a studio or network executive is not unprecedented for the Lansing award — Adele received it in 2023 — but it keeps the prize's spotlight this year on the music side of the entertainment business at a moment when streaming economics, artist ownership of masters and the live-touring boom have all become boardroom topics rather than purely creative ones. Swift's catalog buyback and her control over her tour, film and documentary rights have been widely discussed in music-industry coverage as a model other artists may try to negotiate for themselves.

What happens next

Wednesday's announcement did not specify the exact date or venue of this year's breakfast gala; in recent years it has been held in early December at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The ceremony is expected to be accompanied, as in past years, by the full release of the Power 100 rankings and by additional presenter and honoree announcements in the weeks before the event. The announcement did not include remarks from Swift herself, and as of Wednesday she had not publicly commented on the honor.