J-School Sweeps At News & Documentary Emmy Nominations

In what may be a record, five UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism professors, four lecturers and nineteen alums have been honored in the latest round of News & Documentary Emmy Award nominations.

“These awards are a tribute to the outstanding work being done by men and woman at the highest level of the broadcast journalism and documentary filmmaking professions. They honor the organizations and people who often put their lives on the line to bring us the most critically important stories of our times,” Bob Mauro, president, Academy of Arts and Sciences, said in a press release about the 37th annual awards.

Prof. Orlando Bagwell, director of the J-School’s documentary program, was nominated for the HBO documentary 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets, a film he executive-produced about the murder of a black Jacksonville, Fla., teenager by a middle-aged white man who objected to the loud music coming out of the youth’s SUV. Prof. Michael Pollan was nominated for the PBS documentary In Defense of Food, based on his best-selling book.

Prof. Lowell Bergman, who holds the Logan chair in investigative reporting and is the Pulitzer Prize-winning director of the Investigative Reporting Program, was nominated for the PBS Frontline documentary Rape on the Night Shift. Bergman, along with former IRP Fellow and J-School alum Monica Cruz (’13), was also nominated for Outstanding Investigative Journalism in Spanish for “A Tall Tale,” (El Chino) which aired on Univision.

Lecturer and alum Andres Cediel (’04), and alums Daffodil Altan (’04) and Sasha Khokha (’04) each received two nominations for the film–in both Investigative Journalism and Research–for their work in exposing sexual predation against female janitors nationwide.

Altan received a third nomination for Telemundo’s Batalla en la Frontera, on the rise in corruption and use of deadly force by the U.S. Border Patrol.

The late Lecturer Paul Grabowicz, founder of the School’s multimedia program, was recognized posthumously for his role in making Wiped, Flashed, and Rekitted, The International Black Market of Stolen Cell Phones for National Geographic, nominated in the Academy’s New Approaches: Documentary category. Assistant Professor Richard Koci Hernandez and Lecturer Jeremy Rue (’07) were also nominated for the work, produced by then-graduate students Alexandra Garreton, Jake Nicol and Chris Schodt (all class of ’15) as their master’s project.

Lecturer and Oscar-winner Dan Krauss (’04) was nominated for The Kill Team, about a soldier who starts out as a whistleblower and ends up the target of a war crimes investigation in Afghanistan.

Nearly a dozen other alums were also honored, including Singeli Agnew (’07) for The Puerto Rico Gamble, a documentary on the island’s crippling debt crisis for Al Jazeera America’s Fault Lines, and Andrew Becker (’05) for Telemundo’s Batalla en la Frontera.

Two producers with NBC News, alumnis David Corvo (’72) and Marjorie McAfee (’06), were nominated for On The Brink, a three-year look at New York-based young adults with autism and their families as they transition from graduation to adulthood, for Dateline. Tommy Nguyen (’05), also of Dateline, was nominated for Out of the Shadows, about children who must avoid sunlight because of their medical conditions. Cassandra Herrman (’01) earned a nomination for Conflicted: The Fight for Congo’s Minerals for Al Jazeera America’s Fault Lines; Adithya Sambamurthy (’10) for G.I. BILL$, and Deadly Oil Fields for the PBS NewsHour; Jason Spingarn-Koff (’01) for Transgender, at War and in Love for The New York Times Op-Docs; Emily Taguchi (’06) for the PBS Frontline documentary Growing Up Trans; Lauren Rosenfeld (’12) for Forgotten Youth: Inside America’s Prisons, on the impact of prosecuting minors in the adult criminal justice system for Al Jazeera America’s Fault Lines; Rachel de Leon (’14) for The Dead Unknown, a documentary series that exposed gaps in the system for matching unidentified bodies to missing people, for the Center for Investigative Reporting; Durrell Dawson (’06) for A Different Kind of Boyhood, for Nightline; and Alissa Figueroa (’11) for Prison Kids: America’s Crime Against Children, for Fusion.

“What an extraordinary recognition of the excellence of our visual journalism program,” said Edward Wasserman, dean of the J-School. “I can’t imagine there’s another institution, especially one of our modest size, that has had so many of its graduates honored in a single wave of nominations for such distinguished work, some of which they did while they were still students here. It speaks of their quality, the quality of the instruction they got at the J-School, and the shared commitment we all feel toward creating journalism that has broad public impact. We are very proud.”

The awards will be presented Sept. 21 at a ceremony at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall in New York.

By Marlena Telvick and Julie Hirano