The nominees for the 24th Annual Webby Awards were announced this week, and the American Masters Podcast earned two nominations. Listeners can vote now for the “People’s Voice” awards through May 7. The winners will be announced through a virtual ceremony on May 19.
The American Masters Podcast has been nominated in the following categories, which can be voted on here:
This season of the American Masters Podcast is titled Origins, focusing on subjects who have created bold works through an investigation of their own personal history and upbringing. The artists and cultural figures we interviewed this season have all excelled at this introspective approach in their own way, and we wanted to illuminate the process.
The season began with musicians and sisters, Tegan and Sara, who had a joyful conversation with us at the beginning of their tour to support their new memoir, High School. With the book and its companion album, the two explore their hilarious, sad and sometimes awkward high school years, and discuss with us why they wanted to channel this energy into a multidisciplinary live performance.
Next, we sat down with comedian Chris Gethard, who talks about how important it is to lose well. Gethard spoke about navigating his anxiety and depression and how it ultimately feeds into his comedy in radically transparent and direct ways, which is usually equal parts hilarious and tear-jerking.
Then, writer R.O. Kwon met with us in Washington, D.C. during a book tour for her debut novel, The Incendiaries. Kwon’s work follows a young woman as she falls into the grips of a religious cult. The story is a rumination on Kwon’s own loss of faith, which she graciously opened up about in our conversation.
In our fourth episode, Poet Laureate of the United States Joy Harjo spoke with us about the transcendent nature of language. She describes her poetry as not just speaking to recent history, but also to our ancestors, opening up a dialogue to the farthest-reaching origins of the human spirit.
Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney met up with us in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches at the Yale School of Drama. McCraney rose to fame with his Oscar-winning script for 2017’s Moonlight, in which he explores his own upbringing in Florida. McCraney suggests that “in order for us to really invest in the future, we have to investigate the past.”
We met up with Academy Award-winning actress Lee Grant in her Manhattan apartment to talk about how she survived years on the Hollywood blacklist during the McCarthy era, losing over a decade of work. But this period also served as the starting point of a new career for Grant, as a critically acclaimed documentary filmmaker exposing injustice around the world.
Midway through our season, actor Ethan Hawke had a conversation with our co-producer Josh Hamilton about growing up as a young actor, and how he finds meaning in life through artistic expression. Hawke and Hamilton discuss the theater company they co-founded in the 1990’s called Malaparte, when they were rising actors in the New York scene.
In our conversation with playwright Lynn Nottage, we drill down into the origin story of a specific work of art. Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Sweat, was developed through conversations she had with working class residents of Reading, Pennsylvania, which ultimately predicted a national conversation around identity, race and the economy that remains just as relevant today.
Then, during Oscar season, we met up with writer and director Noah Baumbach to talk about his nominated film, Marriage Story, which tells the story of a complicated bicoastal divorce. Baumbach’s work teases into the territory of autofiction, a subject around which he treads carefully. In our conversation, we get into what moments from life and art inspire his mastery as a writer and storyteller.
Comedian Maria Bamford is not one to shy away from autobiography. She confronts her own well-documented history with mental health and shapes it into a unique brand of standup and comedy writing. Bamford playfully brings many of the characters and voices from her live set into our conversation, and absolutely cracks us up.
In the penultimate episode of our season, it felt appropriate to meet up with theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku to discuss the biggest origin story of all – the origin of the universe. Dr. Kaku was a science enthusiast from a young age, and tells us about the trials and tribulations he faced when building a particle accelerator in his parents’ garage.
To wrap up the season, we spoke with actor and playwright Wallace Shawn about his career’s strange dichotomy between his experimental, socially-conscious writing, and his well-known roles as an actor in films like Toy Story and The Princess Bride. The conversation considers the ways in which we choose to identify ourselves and find meaning in our lives.
Wallace Shawn’s conversation felt like an appropriate end to a season that circled around self-reflection and identity. Our guests have grappled with and turned these personal subjects into evocative works of art. Their conversations can serve as a reminder that even as artists at the height of their disciplines, the most compelling stories in our lives are often our own.
– Joe Skinner, Multimedia Producer for American Masters