Matt Damon, Arts Medalist

The Office for the Arts at Harvard has announced that the Harvard Arts Medal for 2013 will be awarded to actor and writer Matt Damon ’92.  Damon will receive his medal on April 25 in Sanders Theatre, kicking off this spring’s Arts First festival, scheduled for April 25 through 28. More than 1,000  performers will take part in the plethora of events during Arts First weekend, a showcase for student and faculty creativity at Harvard.

Damon achieved national recognition with the 1997 film Good Will Hunting, for which he shared the 1998 Academy Award for best screenplay written directly for the screen with his friend Ben Affleck. In the movie, Damon played a rough-hewn mathematical genius, Will Hunting; he was also nominated as best actor in a leading role for that performance. (He garnered another Oscar nomination in 2010, for best actor in a supporting role in the film Invictus.) He played an action hero, amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne in three “Bourne” movies between 2002 and 2007, and is currently on screens in Promised Land, in which he plays a salesman for a natural gas company in a small town.