Emerson to Honor Four Alumni for Achievements in Communications, Arts

A Disney Channel executive, an Emmy Award-winning television host, a multimedia consultant, and a late-night TV writer will be honored by Emerson College during this year’s Alumni Weekend festivities.

Naketha Mattocks

Naketha Mattocks ’94, vice president of original movies at Disney Channels Worldwide; Jared Bowen ’98, host and executive arts editor at WGBH; and Alyce Myatt ’74, multimedia executive/consultant, will receive this year’s Distinguished Alumni Award on Saturday, June 4, at the Paramount Theatre. Opus Moreschi ’00, the Emmy Award-winning head writer and supervising producer at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, will receive the College’s Young Alumni Achievement Award at the same presentation.

Each year, Emerson honors alumni who have excelled in their fields, and who share a commitment to the College’s students, programs, and initiatives.

Mattocks is responsible for supervising the creative development and production for the hugely successful Disney Channel Original Movie franchise. Descendants and Teen Beach 2 are the top two cable films of 2015 in total viewership. Upcoming films include Adventures in Babysitting, High School Musical 4, and a biopic of Little League pitcher Mo’ne Davis.

Prior to the Disney Channel, Mattocks was an independent film and television producer and sold projects to ABC Family (now Freeform), CBS Films, Lifetime, and VH1. In 2012, Mattocks was a consultant for Lifetime Television, where she served as an executive producer on projects that included House of Versace and Whitney. From 2006 to 2011, she was head of development for Oscar-nominated writer/director Gary Ross’s Larger Than Life Productions, where she oversaw projects with creative talent that included Terence Winter, Dean DeBlois, and Joby Harold. Prior to that, Mattocks was an executive at Paramount Pictures, supervising development and production of films that included Alfie and Charlotte’s Web.

Jared Bowen

Bowen is the Emmy Award-winning host of the weekly television series Open Studio with Jared Bowen, which takes viewers inside the creative process, offering a blend of profiles, performances, and contemporary exhibitions by artists in Greater Boston, New England, and across the country. He is a contributor to WGBH-TV’s nightly news magazine program, Greater Boston, and appears regularly on 89.7 WGBH, where he covers the latest happenings in the region’s theater, art, music, dance, and film scene on Morning Edition, and for Boston Public Radio. He also serves as a coach/judge on the choir competition show Sing That Thing!

He is a member of the Boston Theater Critics Association and the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and he serves on the Board of Governors for the Boston/New England Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Bowen is also a contributor to PBS NewsHour and Art New England magazine. He has produced five news documentaries for WGBH and the first three seasons of the public media company’s Eye on Education initiative. He has won two New England Emmy Awards for his arts reporting and is a recipient of the 2013 Commonwealth Award, recognizing achievement in the arts, humanities, and sciences.

Alyce Myatt

Myatt is an award-winning consultant whose career reflects the intersection of media, art, and philanthropy. She primarily works with funders to help them develop effective grantmaking strategies. Prior to returning to consulting, she was the director of Media Arts for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), where she introduced the funding of new media forms, including app development and video games, led the international cultural exchange project Film Forward: Advancing Cultural Dialogue, and helped with the integration of media technology across all artistic disciplines.

Prior to joining the NEA, Myatt was the founding executive director of Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media (GFEM), a philanthropic member organization whose mission was to advance the field of media arts and public interest media funding. Her career also includes separate stints at PBS—first as director of children’s programming, and later as vice president of programming. In between, she served as program officer for media at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Her production credits include the Smithsonian Institution, Nickelodeon, 3-2-1 Contact!, and ABC’s 20/20. In addition, she has served as either board director or advisor to Arts Engine, Auburn Media at the Center for Multi-Faith Education, the Center for Rural Strategies, the Council on Foundations Technology Task Force, the Emerson College Alumni Association, Grantmakers in the Arts: Art & Social Change Working Group, the National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture, and WITNESS.

Opus Moreschi

Stephen Colbert head writer Moreschi, a self-described “comedy nerd” growing up, performed with the Emerson Comedy Workshop while at the College, and edited the ostensibly humorous magazine The Hyena. After graduation, he performed sketch and improv at i0West in Los Angeles and UCB in New York.

He started his late-night career selling jokes to The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn in 2001, and went on to write for programs like Alf’s Hit Talk Show and Lil’ Bush, which he had to explain to people he met at parties were actual TV shows. Moreschi joined Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report in 2008 and became head writer in 2012. He has three Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, and a small plastic trophy he won in a charity mustache-growing contest.

Past recipients of the Young Alumni Achievement Award include online host (What’s Trending) Shira Lazar ’04 and journalist Brendan McCarthy ’04.

Previous recipients of the Distinguished Alumni Award include Pamela Abdy ’95, president of production at New Regency Productions; Boston Children’s Museum President and CEO Carole Charnow ‘79; and Grammy Award-winning composer (Hairspray, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) Scott Wittman ‘76.