The picture inscribed on the Nathan Award Medallion was devised in 1969. It features three roses, flowers that symbolize the critic's praise, with their thorns symbolizing the critic's scorn.

Randy Gener, senior editor of American Theatre, was named winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2007-2008. His work is familiar to USITT members who recall the article, Technology and the Search for New Metaphysics in Prague, that appeared in TD&T in 2007.

A writer, critic, editor, playwright, and visual artist based in New York City, he is the author of the plays Love Seats for Virginia Woolf and What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Pieces, scholarly essays, and articles and reviews in such publications as The Village Voice, the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Star Ledger, Theatre Design & Technology, and Time Out New York. He has worked as an editor of the Theatre Institute of the Czech Republic's newspaper Prague Quadrennial Today and as a freelance dramaturge for the Joseph Papp Public Theater, Roundabout Theatre Company, Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, and Denver Center Theatre Company.

His floral installation, In the Garden of One World (a collaboration with the Romanian scenic designer Nic Ularu), debuted in 2008 at La MaMa La Galleria. He received a 1995-96 Jerome Foundation American Theatre/Affiliated Writers Program fellowship; a 2003 New York Times critic fellowship at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Critics Institute; grants from the Foundation of the American Theatre Critics Association, the Ford Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding; and a Filipinas Magazine 2007 Arts and Culture Prize, honoring Filipino American leaders who have excelled in their fields. A member of the theater alliances NoPassport and Theater Without Borders, he was inducted in 2008 to Via Times of Chicago's Filipino American Hall of Fame.

The award consists of $10,000 and a statuette, which will be presented to Mr. Gener by Ellis Hanson, chair of the Cornell English Department, at a celebration in New York in March. Considered the highest accolade for dramatic criticism in the United States, and one of the most distinguished in the American theatre, the Nathan Award was endowed by theatre critic George Jean Nathan (1882-1958), who wrote for and co-edited with H.L. Mencken the magazines Smart Set and The American Mercury. The Cornell English Department administers the prize for its alumnus.

The Award Committee's Citation states: "The Nathan committee was particularly impressed by Randy Gener's writing for American Theatre this year. He has used that venue and others to draw our attention to largely ignored voices and visions on the international theatrical scene, to the work of Filipino-American playwright Jessica Hagedorn, to a small but lively Tennessee Williams Festival in Provincetown, and to the future of theatrical criticism itself in essays that wed critical intelligence with a beat reporter's love of the telling an unruly fact. "

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