Lipscomb Students Grab a Gracie Award for `Guess Who` Spot

Congratulations to the five Lipscomb University student producers who were awarded a national Gracie Award in New York City yesterday for Outstanding Public Service Announcement. Their spot,“Guess Who? The Racecar Driver and the Pilot,” competed against professional local, online and public media nationwide to earn a Gracie, an award given annually by the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation (AWM). It was one of five in a series of videos created by the students on behalf of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in partnership with the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and ITVS’ Women and Girls Lead campaign.  It aired on Nashville Public Television (NPT) in May 2012 and subsequently aired nationally on PBS stations.

The Lipscomb communications students were Jason Michael Fox, junior from Nashville; Kathryn McKinley, senior from McMinnville; Kyrsten Turner, junior from Lawrenceville, Ga.; Marlee Vogel, junior from Kingsport; and Brynn Watkins, junior from Freeburg, Ill.

“Guess Who? The Racecar Driver and the Pilot,” highlights two women in non-stereotypical careers usually associated with men: an airline pilot and a race car driver. In addition to traveling to Atlanta and Bowling Green, Ky., to film their two role models, the students used stop-motion animation in the video and conducted in-studio interviews with second-graders. The kids’ comments and surprised reactions reinforced today’s conventional wisdom that pilots and race car drivers are all men.

Watch it here:

Watch Guess Who?: The Race Car Driver and The Pilot on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.

Some snaps of the award winners!

More on “Guess Who” and Alliance for Women in Media Foundation (AWM):

Guess Who is an education program created by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media designed to teach children age 6-9 through the use of video and education curriculum how to challenge gender stereotypes. Lipscomb University was selected along with student producers at Boston University, the University of Southern California, Webster University, and Columbia College to each create a children’s educational program to be aired nationwide as part ITVS’ Women and Girls Lead campaign, a public media campaign designed to celebrate, educate and activate women, girls and their allies across the globe to address the challenges of the 21st century.

For 60 years, AWM has served as the voice and resource for women in the media, and has been a leader in celebrating and honoring programming created for women, by women and about women for more than three decades. The Gracies work to encourage the realistic and faceted portrayal of women in entertainment, commercials, news, features and other programs.

Created under the advisement of NPT, the “GuessWho?” video premiered in May 2012 for a local audience when Academy Award^®-winning actor and Institute Founder Geena Davis, along with the Institute’s Executive Director Madeline Di Nonno, visited the Lipscomb campus as part of a fundraising luncheon held by the Nelson and Sue Andrews Institute for Civic Leadership.

Yesterday’s award luncheon was held at the New York Hilton Hotel in New York City.