At the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, visionary director Trey Fanjoy steps into the spotlight for the 18th annual Louise Scruggs Memorial Forum.

Long before country songs became cinematic universes in three-and-a-half minutes, Trey Fanjoy was learning how to make a story move. Her first film, shot on 8 mm for a 10th-grade social studies project in Rock Hill, South Carolina, offered an early clue: images could do more than illustrate a song or assignment. They could build a world.

On Wednesday, Aug. 19, at 6:30 p.m., the Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum will honor Fanjoy at the 18th annual Louise Scruggs Memorial Forum in the museum’s Ford Theater. In an in-depth conversation led by Museum Writer-Editor Allison Moorer, Fanjoy will look back on more than 30 years as one of country music’s most influential visual architects: a director, producer and creative director whose work helped define how modern country looks, feels and remembers itself.

Fanjoy’s path to Nashville was anything but accidental. After studying journalism at the University of South Carolina, she worked in commercial film production in New York City and Los Angeles, absorbing the discipline of sets, shots and storyboards before moving to Nashville in the mid-1990s. She began as a music video producer, then moved behind the camera as a director, where her instincts for character, atmosphere and emotional payoff quickly became her signature.

Her breakthrough into country-music history came in 2009, when she became the first woman to win the CMA Video of the Year award, for directing Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.” The achievement was not a one-time headline. Fanjoy went on to win CMA Video of the Year for Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built Me” in 2010 and “Bluebird” in 2020, and she has received 18 CMA nominations. Across her career, she has collaborated with Miranda Lambert, Blake Shelton, Swift, Keith Urban, Enrique Iglesias, Carrie Underwood and Country Music Hall of Fame members Alan Jackson, Loretta Lynn, Reba McEntire, Dolly Parton and George Strait, among many others.

What distinguishes Fanjoy’s work is not simply the résumé, but the visual language: weathered rooms, open roads, intimate glances, heightened color, small gestures that carry the weight of memory. In an era when music videos often functioned as branding exercises, Fanjoy treated them as short films, giving songs a second life in images and giving artists a visual mythology that audiences could carry with them.

In 2006, she formed her own production company, Big Feather Films. Her honors include three CMA awards, 23 CMT awards, four Billboard Music awards and one ACM award. She has also served the industry in leadership roles as president of the Nashville Chapter board of the Recording Academy and as a trustee on its national board. With more than 200 music videos to her credit, Fanjoy made her feature-film directorial debut for Sony Pictures in 2021 with “Honey Girls.”

The Louise Scruggs Memorial Forum began in 2007 to recognize music industry leaders who extend the legacy of Louise Scruggs, the trailblazing businesswoman who helped redefine artist management. Scruggs, who was married to Country Music Hall of Fame member and banjo great Earl Scruggs, began booking and managing Flatt & Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys in the mid-1950s. As the first woman in country music to assume those roles, she guided her husband’s career for half a century and set new professional standards in the business.

Past honorees include Alison Brown, Kay Clary, Lorianne Crook, Bebe Evans, Bonnie Garner, Dixie Hall, Cindy Mabe, Mary Martin, Bev Paul, Nancy Shapiro, Denise Stiff, Liz Thiels, Traci Thomas, Sarah Trahern, Marcie Allen Van Mol, Jo Walker-Meador, Kay West and Sally Williams. In honoring Fanjoy, the forum turns its lens toward another kind of behind-the-scenes power: the artist who taught country music how to see itself.

The program is free and open to the public, and tickets can be reserved here.

The Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum collects, preserves and interprets country music and its history for the education and entertainment of diverse audiences. Through exhibitions, publications, digital media and educational programs, the museum explores the cultural importance and enduring beauty of the art form. Among the most-visited history museums in the United States, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum received the National Medal of Arts, the country’s highest honor in the arts, in 2024. Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, the museum is operated by the Country Music Foundation, a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) educational organization chartered by the state of Tennessee in 1964. The Country Music Foundation also operates Historic RCA Studio B®, Hatch Show Print® poster shop, Haley Gallery, CMA Theater, CMF Records, the Frist Library and Archive and CMF Press.

More information about the Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum is available at www.countrymusichalloffame.org or by calling (615) 416-2001.