Viola Davis and Walter Murch Receive Honorary Doctorate Degrees at AFI Conservatory Commencement

Actress and producer Viola Davis and film editor and sound designer Walter Murch received Doctorates of Fine Arts degrees, honoris causa, “for contributions of distinction to the art of the moving image” at the AFI Conservatory’s Class of 2025 commencement ceremony.

Davis was introduced on stage by filmmaker Gina Prince-Bythewood and Murch was introduced by Academy Award®-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (AFI Class of 1969).

In accepting her AFI Honorary Degree, Davis remarked, “You have the power to come home to that one thing that made you want to do this. To be healers, to be alchemists, to buck the system, to see life just a little bit different, and therefore you don’t just leave something for people. You leave something in them.”

Murch, in accepting his AFI Honorary Degree, shared with the graduating class, “When thinking about the future, it occasionally pays to be unreasonably bold.”

The commencement celebrated the AFI Fellows’ completion of two years of concentrated study in AFI’s MFA program.

Davis and Murch join an esteemed group of distinguished past recipients, including Robert Altman, Maya Angelou, Saul Bass, Angela Bassett, Kathryn Bigelow, Mel Brooks, Carol Burnett, Anne V. Coates, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ernest R. Dickerson, Clint Eastwood, Roger Ebert, Nora Ephron, Jodie Foster, Lesli Linka Glatter, Lawrence Herbert, James Earl Jones, Lawrence Kasdan, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Kathleen Kennedy, Angela Lansbury, Spike Lee, David Lynch, Helen Mirren, Rita Moreno, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Paul Schrader, Quentin Tarantino, Lily Tomlin, Robert Towne, Cicely Tyson, Haskell Wexler, John Williams and Michelle Yeoh.