J-School Alums Loom Large in ’17 Emmy Nominations

Two UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism lecturers and nine other alums have been honored in the latest round of News & Documentary Emmy Award nominations, some with multiple nominations.

“These awards are a tribute to the outstanding work being done by these nominees, who provide the viewer with thorough, fact-checked reporting, examining the stories of the day from multiple perspectives while never wavering in their quest to provide us with the truth about world events,” Bob Mauro, president, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, said in a release about the 38th annual awards.

Alumnus and Oscar-winner Dan Krauss (’04), a lecturer in the J-School’s acclaimed documentary program, was nominated for Extremis, a verite documentary for Netflix that explores the harrowing decisions that doctors, families and patients face in urgent end-of-life cases.

Ten other alums were also honored, including Shilpi Gupta (’03) with an Outstanding Hard News Feature nomination for “Gang Land” on ABC’s Nightline; Sweta Vohra (’10) for “The Anacortes Refinery Disaster” for Al Jazeera English’s Fault Lines; Durrell Dawson (’06) for “Shots Fired” on ABC’s Nightline, and Daphne Matziaraki (’16) for 4.1 Miles for New York Times OpDocs.

Gupta was also on the Brian Ross Investigates team that produced “Inside the Hunt for the Boston Bombers” and “The Girl Left Behind.”

Bill Whitaker (class of ’78 & ’17) received nominations for two CBS 60 Minutes investigations: “Rikers Island” and “Finding Refuge,” and Dateline NBC Executive Producer David Corvo (’72) received four nominations for “The Bastille Day Attack,” “Do No Harm,” “David Letterman,” and “The Terrorist Next Door & The Face of Terror.”

Marjorie McAfee (’06) and Emily Taguchi (’06) were both nominated for “Nightclub Massacre: Terror in Orlando” for World News Tonight with David Muir and Nightline. Taguchi was also nominated for Nightline’s “Law and Disorder in the Philippines.”

In the New Approaches categories, Senior Mother Jones Editor and Berkeley Journalism lecturer Dave Gilson (’02) and his team were recognized for “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard,” a multimedia project including a 35,000-word feature, a six-part online video series, and an audio documentary produced in partnership with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

Edward Wong (’98) was nominated for the multimedia project “Carbon’s Casualties” for The New York Times.

“It’s a huge pleasure to see so many alums nominated for Emmys,” said Edward Wasserman, dean of Berkeley Journalism. “The awards are such a recognizable barometer of success, a consensus of peers saying that this is powerful journalism. I would like to congratulate all of our other alums who competed for these prizes, as well as those not named who contributed behind the scenes to the winning works. Thank you for the work you do.”

The awards will be presented Oct. 5 during a ceremony at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall in New York.