Brandi Carlile is the Anthem Awards’ 2026 Entertainer of the Year, honored as this year’s winners were announced Thursday, Nov. 5, “for using her music and platform to champion LGBTQ+ equality, and for directing millions of dollars to grassroots organizations through the Looking Out Foundation,” Billboard reported. The Webby Awards present the Anthems, and this year’s winners came from more than 2,500 entries from 43 countries, Billboard said.
Carlile’s own reaction came in a comment under the Anthem Awards’ Instagram announcement: “This means so much.”
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Her livestreamed benefit, “Be Human: A Concert for Minneapolis,” took Gold Anthems in three categories, including Fundraising Campaign, the awards’ winners gallery shows. The streaming platform Veeps entered it, and its entry calls the show “Brandi Carlile’s answer to the federal ICE deployment, Operation Metro Surge.”
Carlile’s fellow special achievement honorees include Seth Rogen and Lauren Miller Rogen as Advocates of the Year, Jay Shetty for Podcast of the Year and WNBA star Nneka Ogwumike as Athlete of the Year. The Anthem Awards said the group was honored “for their dedication to amplifying opportunity, visibility, and change.”
What Brandi Carlile’s Anthem Awards Citation Says
The awards praised “her extraordinary ability to use music, community, and her platform to advance social change and amplify voices too often pushed to the margins.” “Throughout her career, Carlile has been a powerful advocate for LGBTQ+ equality and representation,” the citation said.
She founded the Looking Out Foundation with fellow Grammy winners Phil and Tim Hanseroth, according to the foundation. Its money goes to “grassroots organizations working across LGBTQ+ rights, humanitarian relief, racial justice, women’s rights, and other critical issues,” the Anthem citation said.
The foundation “amplifies the impact of music by awarding grants, engaging community, and creating powerful partnerships,” its website says, and the Los Angeles Press Club puts its grants to community nonprofits at more than $10 million.
One of those partnerships produced the Elton John Impact Awards, created by iHeartMedia and Procter & Gamble with the Elton John AIDS Foundation and the Looking Out Foundation, Gayety reported in June.
Brandi Carlile on ‘Chosen Family’ and Meeting the Moment
“I feel a big responsibility to meet the moment,” Carlile told Time in February, when the magazine named her one of its 2026 Women of the Year. At the Feb. 1 Grammys, she and Elton John were up for best song written for visual media with “Never Too Late,” Gayety’s winners list shows.
Success “comes and goes,” she said, but the “one thing that has proven true and steadying to me is to have a community, a chosen family.” “And I think LGBTQ people have a unique perspective and ability to do this,” she told Time.
Carlile realized she was gay at 15, after watching the coming-out episode of “Ellen,” People reported in 2021. “I came out of the closet before I’d ever even met a gay person in real life,” she told the magazine.
“You kind of get up and you decide to come out of the closet every day for your whole life,” she said in the same interview.
Carlile’s Club Tour and Dec. 6 Los Angeles Honor
Carlile is back on the road with Phil and Tim Hanseroth, letting fans pick the setlist each night. Her Burn the Setlist Tour opened Thursday at Portland’s Revolution Hall, where she moved to the piano for “Human” and said, “We now call that the sad gay version, but it’s the original version,” RIFF reported. The tour plays Oakland’s Fox Theater on Saturday, Nov. 7.
The Los Angeles Press Club will give her its Visionary Award for Humanitarian Work on Dec. 6 at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel downtown, during its National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards gala, the club announced in October. “Her work is amazing and, during these troubling times, desperately needed,” said Danny Bakewell Jr., the club’s president.
The club also credited her Minneapolis livestream with raising more than $750,000 for The Advocates for Human Rights. “Topical songs like ‘The Joke,’ ‘Human’ and ‘Church & State’ have spoken to her vision for social justice,” Bakewell said.
