And the Emmy Goes to...Three Mounties in Three Years

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.

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.

Sarah Murphy Lavoie, C'03

Erin Newsome, C'00

Peter Kelly, C'16

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 effort that went into the 2020 installment of the beloved documentary series Cosmos. The original Cosmos series, Comos: A Personal Voyage, aired in 1980 and was presented by Carl Sagan. The 2014 follow-up, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, was the effort of many, including Carl Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan and Seth MacFarlane, and was presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson. The same group helped with the 2020 installment, Cosmos: Possible Worlds, which was the focus of “Creating Cosmos."

Naturally, developing “Creating Cosmos" was challenging at times. It was Lavoie’s first project after returning from maternity leave, and she notes that working on such a big project while often sleep-deprived was a learning curve. Newsome recalls the difficulties of accommodating a variety of visions while creating one series, finding that the Cosmos series had a deeply personal meaning to most of the people working on it (such as Sagan’s widow), and noting the rewards that come from such collaboration.

Newsome and Lavoie both remark how special it was to have “supported a series of such nostalgic proportions," as Newsome put it. Lavoie excitedly recalled her mother loving the original Cosmos and watching it as a child. They also note what a big deal it is for a marketing team to win a Primetime Emmy and what an honor it is to have been a part of this project.

Looking back, the women easily see the ways their time at the Mount helped them achieve such impressive careers. Neither began their freshman year thinking they would end up where they are now, but the Mount was “preparing us for something we didn’t know we wanted," says Lavoie. Being able to work closely with professors, and on a variety of campus efforts such as the Mountain Echo newspaper and Mount TV, helped them uncover their true talents and abilities.

They developed their love of storytelling, and the influence that language and communication have on a story. They had the chance to question, and to fail, and come out stronger each time. They learned to work hard and stay open to the opportunities that came their way. “I chased my passion, rather than a career," states Newsome. And their work on the series that earned them an Emmy wouldn’t have been possible without that willingness to explore and take chances that the Mount fostered in them.

PETER KELLY, C'16

Peter Kelly’s first Emmy came in 2019, from his contribution to the Eagles’ playoff hype video, titled, “Now Is All We Need." After an initial meeting of the marketing team on how to approach the video, he immediately made a sample of possible audio effects—sound effects, cues, voiceover and the like—to include. Impressed, his teammates went on to design the visual elements of the video based on his audio proposal.

He exclaims that the video was “a really special project because normally my work is fairly reactive, meaning I am given a video or animation and am tasked with generating and creating audio for the picture. This video however, started with the audio, and the video was shot around it." He even composed the music featured in “Now Is All We Need." Kelly’s original audio content earned him the admiration of his teammates, the enthrallment of his audience—and his first regional Emmy.

He won his second Mid-Atlantic Emmy, along with his coworkers, the following year, for their production of a video on the Eagles’ nominee for the Walter Peyton Man of the Year Award. For this video, he and his coworkers filmed a surprised Rodney McLeod, being informed by Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie that he was their nominee. Between production complications arising from COVID-19 and extra steps that had to be taken to surprise McLeod, Kelly notes that completing the video was “quite a live production feat," and they were all proud to have been awarded an Emmy for it.

Reflecting on it all, Kelly acknowledges that his time at the Mount as a music student, particularly the professors he encountered there, shaped the audio engineer that he is today. He was always intrigued by the influence sound has on a video, citing movies with epic scores like Indiana Jones and Star Wars as examples. Coming to the Mount, receiving the guidance and recognition that a small, close-knit campus provides, he could develop his passions into a career path. “Dr. Carlson and Dr. Rosenfeld in the VPA Department were instrumental (pun definitely intended) in laying the building blocks for the sound designer I am today,“ he shares. “Their guidance…provided me the tools to pursue the musical styles and ideas that I use every day.“