And the Emmy Goes to... Three Mounties in Three Years
Erin Newsome, C'00
Sarah Murphy Lavoie, C'03
By Katherine Stohlman
IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, three Mounties have won a total of three Emmy Awards, for various projects they’ve done in the course of their careers. Erin Newsome, C’00, and Sarah Murphy Lavoie, C’03, won a Primetime Emmy Award for a project they both worked on as members of National Geographic’s marketing team. Peter Kelly, C’16, won two Mid-Atlantic Emmy Awards as an audio engineer and sound designer for the NFL team, the Philadelphia Eagles. Different as their work is, all three credit the Mount with being a source of support as they developed their passions and talents. ERIN NEWSOME, C'00 AND SARAH MURPHY LAVOIE, C'03 Newsome and Lavoie share stories of opportunities they had as Mount students—experiences that gave them the knowledge and skills to eventually produce an Emmy-winning miniseries. Although they never got to know each other during their time at the Mount, their journeys are strikingly similar. Both studied rhetoric and communication. Both worked on Mount TV, Newsome as a founding member and Lavoie as a later member working to keep it alive. Both cite the Art of Persuasion class they took, as well as the encouraging influence of a former professor, Joe Osment, on their goals. Lavoie even recalls Professor Osment praising Newsome for the job at Discover’s Travel Channel she landed out of college. Newsome now is vice president of creative marketing at Disney Branded Television and National Geographic. Eventually, Lavoie found herself also working at Discover, and later on the marketing team at National Geographic as senior writer producer, alongside Newsome for the first time. The project for which they and their coworkers won a 2020 Primetime Emmy was called “Creating Cosmos.“ It was a six-part miniseries of short films that showed the behind-the-scenes 24
FEATURE SUMMER 2022
Peter Kelly, C'16
