Alum Wins Emmy for Work on Netflix Children’s Series
Joe Nash ’07 was the executive producer for an episode of “We the People” that featured the poetry of Amanda Gorman. The series won a 2022 Children’s & Family Emmy for Outstanding Short Form Program.By: Meghan Kita Tuesday, June 27, 2023 11:15 AM
Joe Nash '07 discovered a love for animation during a Philadelphia-based internship his senior year at Muhlenberg.Listen to a more extensive interview on the alumni podcast 2400 Chew
Joe Nash ’07 was spending time with his daughter late last year when he got a Slack message from a colleague that said, “Hey, can you get on a call in 10 minutes?” That colleague, Justin Harris, was a fellow executive producer on the 2021 children’s series We the People, which Netflix produced in partnership with former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground.
Nash told Harris he was busy and asked if the request was really that important. Harris replied, “Well, I just want to let you know you won an Emmy.”
We the People creator, Chris Nee, imagined the show as a modern-day version of Schoolhouse Rock!. Nash, who was a media & communication and film studies double major at Muhlenberg, had a variety of internships as a student, experiential learning experiences the College “pushed and promoted,” he says. That’s how he learned he was less interested in live-action television and film production and more interested in animation, which he discovered through a Philadelphia-based internship during his senior year. That interest held through much of his career, and he got involved with the We the People series through his former employer, the design agency BUCK.
Nash was executive producer on the episode “The Miracle of Morning,” for which Amanda Gorman, America’s first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate, wrote an original poem. That meant he was in charge of assembling a team that could create this five-minute, cel animated (that is, drawn by hand) episode — and he did it just as the pandemic was starting.
“We had a 40- or 50-person design and animation team working on this over about eight months, creating this episode but also defining how we worked in a remote world,” he says. “It was a nice reflection of what the poem was about, which was trying to be human with each other in this time of despair and uncertainty.”
Nash, who has done and continues to do a lot of work in advertising and marketing as an independent consultant, feels proud to be part of this series: “A lot of what we make goes out into the world and is never to be seen again,” he says. “The idea that we were able to tell a story that people connected with and felt was important enough to say it was deserving of this award … it doesn’t feel disposable.”
