Sue Ellen McCann, B.A. Hutchins, 1976

Sue Ellen McCann


Sue Ellen McCann graduated from the Hutchins program at SSU in 1976 and received her Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989. Currently, she serves as the senior executive producer at KQED T.V. (Channel 9) in San Francisco. McCann is responsible for the entire television production staff of the station and all the programs they produce. She oversees the fiscal planning of programs created by the T.V. Productions Department and serves as executive producer for the monthly documentary series, Bay Window, the nationally-distributed weekly science and technology series, Springboard, and the new cooking series Jacques Pepin Celebrates! She provides direction for the research and development of new programs and works directly with the New Media Department at KQED in the creation of websites for all programs, developing innovative new combinations of television and the Internet. One of her most notable achievements has been the creation of an extensive outreach effort on behalf of KQED to the Bay Area's diverse communities.

McCann was the recipient of a 2000 Emmy Award for a series of shorts she produced on the importance of voting. She was also honored at the 2001 National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Community Service and Public Service Announcement Emmy Awards for her documentary "No Turning Back." This program offered a local perspective focusing on the experiences of three refugees in the Bay Area seeking political asylum from the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service.

McCann has produced documentaries for PBS Frontline and worked at the Center for Investigative Reporting. She founded and runs Studio Miramar, which completed the T.V. series Digital Divide, which aired nationally on PBS last year. Her focus is education, technology and the future. One of her programs called Fair Play is a series which explores the reasons girls use computers less than boys. She also did a two-hour educational program based on the classic art book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and six shorts that featured San Francisco community organizations and individuals, spanning twenty-five years of activism.

A short list of her clients include: PBS, the Bay Area Video Coalition, the National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution (Archives or American Art), California Tomorrow, the United Nations (FAO), the US State Department (Agency for International Development), St. Mary's College, Zoshinkai Publishing (Tokyo) and Antenna Theater.

McCann says„ "some of the most important lessons I have learned in life came from sitting around a table at a Hutchins seminar discussing the works of great philosophers and social theorists„" and continues to apply those lessons to her daily life as producer.

McCann has been involved with the community through outreach efforts such as training environmental journalists in Nepal in documentary production for the Asia Foundation, creating teenage sex education CD ROMs for Bay Area teens, and creating touch screen kiosks for AIDS education for the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention. She is a founding member of the Association of Independent Public Television Producers and has worked with the Bay Area Video Coalition to promote greater role for women in news media.