The Woman of the Year award was founded in 1987 by Assemblywomen Bev Hansen and Sally Tanner who wanted to recognize remarkable women throughout California for Women’s History Month. Every year, the representatives of each Assembly and Senate district in California recognize a woman for her impact on her community.
Maggie Mackay, executive director of Vidiots, an Eagle Rock non-profit video store and theater, is this year’s 52nd Assembly District Woman of the Year. Mackay said she attended the March 16 awards ceremony in Sacramento, where recipients from each district spoke about their accomplishments and received their awards.
“It was a really moving experience because […] you’re in a room with some of the most interesting, dynamic women in the state of California,” Mackay said. “It was a pretty high honor.”
According to Assemblymember Jessica Caloza of the 52nd Assembly District, who made the selection, Mackay is more than deserving of thanks for her hard work on the restoration of the historic theater on Eagle Rock Boulevard which Vidiots calls home today.
“Her dedication to preserving the arts and uplifting our local creative community made her a clear choice for AD-52’s 2026 Woman of the Year,” Caloza said via email. “She has brought new life to the historic Eagle Theater — creating a vibrant space where art, culture and our community come together.”
Caloza said that the arts are essential for building community in our current cultural and political moment.
“At a time when the digital age becomes our new normal, it is so easy to forget the value of physical media and the sense of community that sharing it can create,” Caloza said via email. “This year, I wanted to celebrate someone whose work is leaving a mark on our history and is bringing Angelenos closer together.”
According to its website, Vidiots was founded in 1985 in Santa Monica, closed in 2017 due to rising costs and reopened in Eagle Rock in 2023. Mackay said it took a lot of effort on her part to make the reopening happen. She started this project with just a small team, Mackay said, which has now grown to include almost 45 people.
“I was doing everything, from raising the money to fighting for the permits — which in and of itself is a full-time job — to figuring out what the creative vision was going to be to assembling the team,” Mackay said.
Mackay said now that Vidiots is up and running, her responsibilities as Executive Director have changed.
“My role has kind of shifted now more into sort of stewarding this large and wonderful ship full of really smart, talented people,” Mackay said.
Mackay said her job now is to ensure the business is financially sustainable and growing.
“I oversee all of the fundraising and business aspects of the organization,” Mackay said.
According to Mackay, the reopening of Vidiots in Eagle Rock has brought two community resources back: both Vidiots and the Eagle Rock Theater.
“Movie theaters and film spaces like Vidiots have the capacity to really act as what we call a ‘third space’ for community members, especially in a time when there is so much darkness, so much sadness, so much uncertainty,” Mackay said.
Driven by a desire to carry on the legacy of Vidiots founders, Patty Polinger and Cathy Tauber, Mackay said she took the risk of leaving her well-established career as a film programmer.
“I had already known for a very long time the importance of Vidiots in the city of Los Angeles as a cultural hub,” Mackay said. “And then when I met [Polinger and Tauber], I discovered that they were sort of like my big sisters in the cultural landscape.”
According to Mackay, Polinger and Tauber were not taken seriously in the film world when they got their start in the 1980s.
“They had been very underestimated when they started out in 1985 with Vidiots,” Mackay said. “Then they created something enormously successful, and more importantly than successful, they created something with real longevity and real cultural influence on some of the most well-established filmmakers working today.”
According to Mackay, Polinger and Tauber’s persistence inspired her work on the restoration of the theater and Vidiots.
“Knowing that they had really fought to create a space in the landscape made it even more appealing for me to take that kind of a risk because carrying on their legacy became really, honestly, more compelling to me even than just ‘let’s try to keep something very cool running,’” Mackay said. “It also became a sort of philosophical journey for me to ensure that their legacy was going to remain.”
Vidiots Director of Marketing, Saila Reyes, said Mackay has been expanding on Polinger and Tauber’s original mission.
“Patty and Cathy are incredible women who had a vision […] so that’s why they built this incredible collection that we’re still expanding today,” Reyes said. “There’s nothing [Mackay] does that doesn’t go directly back to Patty and Cathy’s vision statement.”
Working so hard on an important historical theatre and making it accessible to the community are huge accomplishments, according to Reyes.
“Her highlight reel is incredible,” Reyes said. “No one deserves ‘Woman of the Year’ more.”
Contact Claire Wilson-Black at wilsonblack@oxy.edu and Amelia Darling adarling@oxy.edu
