Great Performances: GRAMMY® Salute to Music Legends TCA Panelist Bios
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PBS 50th Anniversary TCA Summer 2020 Panelist Bios Paula Kerger Paula A. Kerger is president and chief executive officer of PBS, the nation’s largest non-commercial media organization, with more than 330 member stations throughout the country. Having joined PBS in March 2006, Kerger is the longest-serving president and CEO in PBS history. Under Kerger’s leadership, PBS has grown its audiences across genres and platforms. PBS has moved from the 14th most- watched network in America to number seven in the past decade. Over the course of a year, 83% percent of all U.S. television households watch PBS, and each month, Americans view nearly 300 million videos across PBS’s web, mobile and connected device platforms. Since Kerger’s arrival, PBS has consistently presented high-quality, groundbreaking content that delivers on the founding mission of public television — to educate, inspire and entertain the American people. Among her accomplishments are the pop culture phenomenon “Downton Abbey” on MASTERPIECE; Ken Burns’s and Lynn Novick’s critically acclaimed THE VIETNAM WAR; the documentary “Hamilton’s America,” about the Broadway smash hit musical, on GREAT PERFORMANCES; “Freedom Riders” on AMERICAN EXPERIENCE; and award-winning children’s programs such as DANIEL TIGER’S NEIGHBORHOOD. In the past year, PBS and its producing partners have been recognized with several prestigious honors, including seven Peabody Awards, six Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards and nine News & Documentary Emmy Awards. Kerger has made particularly strong commitments to PBS’s work in children’s education. She led the historic launch of the PBS KIDS 24/7 broadcast and streaming channel, ensuring that PBS’s educational programming can reach children anytime and anywhere through local stations. In addition, Kerger oversaw the development of PBS LearningMedia, which empowers teachers across America to engage and inspire their students with high-quality digital content. Kerger also serves as president of the PBS Foundation, an independent organization that raises private sector funding — a significant source of revenue for new projects at PBS. Kerger is regularly included in the Hollywood Reporter’s “Women in Entertainment Power 100,” an annual survey of the nation’s top women executives in media, as well as Washingtonian Magazine’s “Most Powerful Women in Washington.” She has been honored with the Woman of Achievement Award from Women in Development, New York; the National Education Association Friend of Education Award; the Giants of Broadcasting Award; the Realscreen Hall of Fame Award; and Promax/BDA, B&C and Multichannel News Brand Builder Award. In 2017, she received the Advancing American Democracy Award from the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site. Prior to joining PBS, Kerger served for more than a decade at Educational Broadcasting Corporation (EBC), the parent company of Thirteen/WNET and WLIW21 New York, where her ultimate position was executive vice president and chief operating officer. Her tenure boasts many achievements, including WNET’s completion in 1997 of the largest successful endowment campaign ever undertaken by a public television station. Kerger received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Baltimore, where she serves on the Merrick School of Business Dean’s Advisory Council. She has received honorary doctorates from Washington University in St. Louis, Grand Valley State University, Allegheny College, Northeastern University and the University of North Carolina Asheville. She is a member of the Women’s Forum, director of the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, a member of Meredith Corporation’s Board of Directors and chair of the board of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Judy Woodruff Broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff is the anchor and managing editor of the PBS NewsHour. She has covered politics and other news for five decades at NBC, CNN and PBS. At PBS from 1983 to 1993, she was the chief Washington correspondent for the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. From 1984 to 1990, she also anchored PBS's award-winning documentary series "Frontline with Judy Woodruff." Moving to CNN in 1993, she served as anchor and senior correspondent for 12 years; among other duties, she anchored the weekday program "Inside Politics." She returned to the NewsHour in 2007, and in 2013, she and the late Gwen Ifill were named the first two women to co-anchor a national news broadcast. After Ifill's death, Woodruff was named sole anchor. In 2011, Judy was the anchor and reporter for the PBS documentary "Nancy Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime." And in 2007, she completed an extensive project on the views of young Americans, titled "Generation Next: Speak Up. Be Heard." Two hour-long documentaries aired on PBS, along with a series of reports on the “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” NPR, in USA Today and on Yahoo News. From 2006 to 2013, Judy anchored a monthly program for Bloomberg Television, "Conversations with Judy Woodruff." In 2006, she was a visiting professor at Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. In 2005, she was a visiting fellow at Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. At NBC News, Woodruff was White House correspondent from 1977 to 1982. For one year after that, she served as NBC's “Today Show” chief Washington correspondent. She wrote the book This is Judy Woodruff at the White House, published in 1982 by Addison-Wesley. Her reporting career began in Atlanta, where she covered state and local government. Woodruff is a founding co-chair of the International Women's Media Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting and encouraging women in journalism and communication industries worldwide. She serves on the boards of trustees of the Freedom Forum, The Duke Endowment and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and is a director of Public Radio International and the National Association to End Homelessness. She is a former member of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a former director of the National Museum of American History and a former trustee of the Urban Institute. Judy is a graduate of Duke University, where she is a trustee emerita. She is the recent recipient of the Radcliffe Medal, the Poynter Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism, the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism from Arizona State University. She received the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award in Television from Washington State University, the Gaylord Prize for Excellence in Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of Oklahoma and the Al Neuharth Award for Excellence in the Media from the University of South Dakota. She was inducted into the Georgia Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame and received the Leonard Zeidenberg First Amendment Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association and the Duke Distinguished Alumni Award, among others. She is the recipient of more than 25 honorary degrees. Judy lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, journalist Al Hunt. They are the parents of three children: Jeffrey, Benjamin and Lauren. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and literary scholar. He is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He has authored or co-authored 24 books and created 21 documentary films. His six-part PBS documentary series THE AFRICAN AMERICANS: MANY RIVERS TO CROSS (2013), which he wrote, executive produced and hosted, earned the Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program — Long Form, as well as the Peabody Award, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award and NAACP Image Award. Professor Gates also wrote, executive produced and hosted the Emmy Award-nominated two-part PBS documentary series BLACK AMERICA SINCE MLK: AND STILL I RISE (2016), chronicling the last 50 years of African American history in the U.S. In addition to the ongoing production of FINDING YOUR ROOTS, his most recent projects include the three-part PBS documentary series AFRICA’S GREAT CIVILIZATIONS (2017), the four-hour PBS history series RECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA AFTER THE CIVIL WAR (2019), winner of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and the related books Dark Sky Rising: Reconstruction and the Dawn of Jim Crow with Tonya Bolden (Scholastic, 2019) and Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (Penguin Random House, 2019) a New York Times Notable Book of 2019. Having written for such leading publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times and Time, Professor Gates serves as chairman of TheRoot.com, a daily online magazine he co- founded in 2008, and chair of the Creative Board of FUSION TV. He oversees the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field, and has received grant funding to develop a FINDING YOUR ROOTS curriculum to teach students science through genetics and genealogy. The recipient of 56 honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998, he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. He earned his B.A. in English language and literature, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1973, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge in 1979. Ken Burns Ken Burns has been making documentary films for over 40 years. Since the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War; Baseball; Jazz; The War; The National Parks: America’s Best Idea; The Roosevelts: An Intimate History; Jackie Robinson; The Vietnam War; and Country Music.