Actress Dakota Johnson to Receive KVIFF President's Award

American actress Dakota Johnson will be on hand at the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival to receive the KVIFF President’s Award and to present her two latest films.

Dakota Johnson continues her family’s multigenerational acting tradition, as represented by her grandmother Tippy Hedren and both of her parents, award-winning Hollywood stars Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson.

It should thus not come as a surprise that her film debut was at age ten, when she appeared in Crazy in Alabama (1999, dir. Antonio Banderas). After finishing high school, she embarked on a professional acting career and also had a breakthrough in the world of modeling. In 2010, she appeared in David Fincher’s The Social Network, which earned her and the entire cast best ensemble awards from the Hollywood Film Awards, the Phoenix Film Critics Society, and the 2011 Palm Springs Film Festival.

Worldwide popularity came with the film adaptation of E. L. James’s “Fifty Shades” trilogy – Fifty Shades of Grey (2015. dir. Sam Taylor-Johnson), Fifty Shades Darker (2017, dir. James Foley), and Fifty Shades Freed (2018, dir. James Foley). In 2015, she appeared in director Scott Cooper’s star-studded biographical crime drama Black Mass, and the following year she was nominated for a BAFTA in the category of Rising Star. Her performance in the remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (2018, dir. Luca Guadagnino) earned her a Robert Altman Award from the Film Independent Spirit Awards.

She co-starred in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter (2021), which was nominated for three Oscars, and played the main role in another film adaptation, this time of Jane Austen’s romantic novel Persuasion (2022, dir. Carrie Cracknell). She next stars in Amazon’s romance thriller Verity (2026, dir. Michael Showalter).

In 2019, Johnson launched TeaTime Pictures with her producing partner Ro Donnelly. They produced the comedy Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022, dir. Cooper Raiff), Am I OK? (2022, dir. Stephanie Allynne and Tig Notaro), and recently the drama Daddio (2023, dir. Christy Hall), which is based on the emotional, concentrated dialogue of two randomly connected people, played by Johnson and Sean Penn.

As a director, Johnson has shot the Coldplay music video Cry Cry Cry and the short film Loser Baby (2023).

At the festival in Karlovy Vary, Dakota Johnson will present two films she is currently appearing in – the romantic comedy full of provocative chaos Splitsville (2025, dir. Michael Angelo Covino), which she also produced under her TeaTime Pictures banner, and the comedy Materialists, an exploration of a somewhat toxic relationship triangle by one of today’s most lauded directors, Celine Song and co-stars Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans. Dakota Johnson will receive the KVIFF President’s Award before the screening of Materialists on July 6 at 10.30pm in the Grand Hall of the Hotel Thermal.