 He won a Personal Peabody Award in 1998.He began his career on CBS in the 1950s, where he began to notice the scarcity of programming devoted to the fine arts on television.It was his dream to bring more of it to the home screen on a regular basis, but he did not receive a full opportunity to do so until the creation of National Educational Television, where it soon became possible, thanks largely to Venza, to see great dramatic literature regularly performed by some of the world's most renowned actors.