On Saturday, Oct. 18, during an awards ceremony in Prior Lake, Minnesota, Pioneer PBS’s locally produced program Postcards and Pioneer PBS Specials program took home four Upper Midwest Emmy awards out of 22 total nominations featuring stories about you and your neighbors and even our staff from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Upper Midwest Chapter. This is the 13th year in a row Pioneer PBS has received Upper Midwest Emmys for its local programs, for a total of 35 Emmys since 2013.
The Pioneer PBS Postcards team, produced by Dana Conroy, with videography and editing by Ben Dempcy and Kristofor Gieske, received two Emmys within the same Arts/ Entertainment-Short Form Content (up to 10 minutes) category. The “Heart of Art” features painter Janel Guertin, who has ingeniously combined her passion for painting with her love for her cats, and Anything but Brushes features painter Zak Jahn, whose unique painting style draws inspiration from the emotions he’s feeling in the moment, which are applied to the canvas in many ways besides the brush. The third Emmy win came in the Lifestyle-Short Form Content (up to 10 minutes) category for “Driven to Excellence,” which features Chris Runge who is the founder of Runge Cars, a company known for its innovative and uniquely custom-designed handbuilt vehicles.
“Held in Minnesota: Untold WWII POW Stories,” produced by Susan Marks, won an award in the Documentary-Historical category. The story is about the forgotten history of 21 POW labor camps in Minnesota during WWII, by way of a major POW camp in Algona, Iowa.
