The Best of Emerson: 45 Years of The EVVYs

On Friday, May 8, at roughly 8:00 p.m., the curtain at the Cutler Majestic Theatre will close on the 45th Annual EVVY Awards. Minutes later, informal planning for EVVYs 46 will get underway.

As the nation’s largest entirely student-run live multi-cam production, the machine never fully winds down. There are two ceremonies to be produced by nearly 250 students, and 40 presenters giving awards to winners in 68 categories. Those winners are selected by more than 90 judges wading through 1,400 submissions. That’s not to mention the live performances, video packages, fundraising, marketing campaigns, and myriad other moving pieces.

“As soon as one show ends, the next show begins, and I’m totally serious about that,” said Tony Ascenso ’00, MA ’20, director of production facilities and advisor to the EVVYs. “Right now, in April, we’re about to select the producers for the next year.”

In its 45th year, the EVVYs is not just a colossal undertaking, it’s also one of the longest-running traditions at Emerson College. And that tradition has enabled thousands of students over the years to glean professional-level experience working on a live awards show.

EVVY1

The first EVVYs in 1982 was an off-shoot of Emerson Independent Video (EIV) and gave out exclusively television-related awards in just eight categories. It was bootstrapped together with nothing but an idea planted by then-professor Micki Dickoff, and a lot of scrappy ambition on the part of two students who would produce the show: Martie Cook ’82, MFA ’00 (now professor and Center for the Comedic Arts founding director) and Glenn Meehan ’83 (now director of the Comedy Conservatory at Emerson Los Angeles).

Cook and Meehan funded the show with raffle tickets and bake sales. Dickoff knew a local TV producer and Emersonian, Sid Levin ’79, co-founder of EIV, who donated equipment. They wrote letters to local TV personalities asking them to present—and many of them did.

“We walked around and we just begged people, but they gave us stuff,” Cook said.

They booked a local church for May 22, and set about creating video to show during the ceremony. It wasn’t until the day of the show that they realized it would still be light out at 7:00 p.m. in late May, and sunshine would be streaming in through the church windows, making it nearly impossible to see any of the clips.

Meehan ran back to his dorm, gathered as many blankets, sleeping bags, and blithely ignorant students as he could, and led them all up onto the roof of the church to cover the windows.

“I swear to God this is true, the reverend came out and caught us—and imagine his point of view, with all of these kids on the roof of your church; it’s a liability waiting to happen,” Cook said. “He was really angry, but he got there too late and we’d covered it.”

The show’s name was another 11th-hour change. Cook and Meehan had been calling it the “EMMYs” (“Em” for Emerson, and “Emmys” for, you know…) until someone, probably from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, sent them a letter informing them that it was copyright infringement. The letter arrived the same day they had to get the programs to the printer, so Cook suggested, off the cuff, calling them the “EVVYs,” for their “parent company,” EIV.

“For the past 45 years, every time I see it on somebody’s resume…I giggle because…everybody spends millions of dollars on marketing research and Martie [came up with it] in the stairwell in three minutes,” Meehan said. “And it’s brilliant and it stuck.”

EVVY45

Today, the EVVYs have a much larger team and budget, but there’s still an element of scrappiness required to make sure the show goes off without a hitch.

As logistics producer on EVVY45, Henry Thomas ’27 leads a team of students in procuring and securing all the things offstage and out of the control room that make the show run. They coordinate the submissions, judges, and presenters. They make sure students staying past finals to work on the show have housing. They order the trophies; get crew T-shirts; make sure everything’s ready for load-in.

“If it requires some coordination with someone at the College, most of the time, it’s coming through us,” said Thomas.

This will be Thomas’s third (and final) year working on the show. Last July, after EVVY44 was in the rearview, he began thinking about what worked and what didn’t. One of the first conversations he remembers having was about the culture of the show: “What’s the culture we want to create, what’s the environment?”

“Being a producer is one part all the logistics and 16 parts making sure that everyone feels safe and open and heard and that this is a space that they want to come back to,” he said. “That’s how the EVVYs runs every year, is people coming back.”

One special honoree who will be coming back to the EVVYs this year is Emerson College Trustee Seth Grahame-Smith ’98, a novelist, screenwriter, and producer who is credited with creating the “mash-up” literary genre with his bestselling novels Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, both of which were made into films. Grahame-Smith, who himself was a producer on EVVY16, will be presented with this year’s Alumni Award of Distinction.

Each EVVYs theme is usually selected by the start of the school year, and by mid-October, students on the aesthetics team are at work on set design concepts. EVVYs sets are slick and elaborate, and they’re made possible by a longstanding partnership with VDA, an event design agency based in Watertown, MA, founded by David Breen ’78. Breen and his team, which includes senior lighting designer Anne Dresbach ’04 and project manager Eric Hershelman ’20, work with students over the winter to solidify the design, and provide décor and draping the night of the show, all for about half of what the EVVYs could expect to pay.

 “All my [personal] design time is comped,” Breen told Emerson Today in 2024. “Those hours are part of my relationship with my school. I’m proud to do it because I want it to be successful.”

For the last couple of years, Ascenso said, they’ve put on an SNL-type show as a kind of trial run over the winter, which gives the director the chance to work with the aesthetics team, the crew, and the theater personnel. That’s because the EVVYs is both a live performance and a television broadcast, and that can be tricky to navigate.

“How you perform in the theater and how you do it for television [are] two different things, so by having this show, everyone starts to learn how those pieces can come together, like how [stage] light affects the camera and how people should present themselves,” Ascenso said.

For Associate Content Producer Sasha Turbow ’28, that blend of live performance and film was one of the draws to working on the EVVYs. She assists Content Producer Paige Shepherd ’27 in filming video packages to run at various points of the show. She’s been on set every weekend working on different packages, and has been able to hang out in the writers’ room, watching their process.

“I always say that the EVVYs is the one organization on campus that really pulls from all the aspects that Emerson has to offer,” Turbow said. “And I feel like content, specifically, pulls from all those categories and mixes it into one.”

The EVVYs Effect

Just as the production draws from all elements of the Emerson community, the categories recognize and celebrate student work from (almost) all corners of the College. (The one exception, which Ascenso said he is trying very hard to incorporate in future shows, is Communication Sciences and Disorders). From just eight TV broadcast–related awards in 1982, the EVVYs has grown to include 68 categories in film and TV, live performance, creative writing and journalism, marketing and communications campaigns, and more.

From day one, the EVVYs has always been about recognizing student work.

“We could look back and say, ‘What the hell were you thinking?’” Meehan, one of the original producers, recalled. “But right out of the gate…we did it for the students, and we really wanted their work to be viewed by people in the industry in Boston.”

“The excitement of winning an EVVY is just so sweet,” Cook said. “Being nominated for an EVVY is just so sweet.”

Aidan Vahey ’26 saw his first EVVYs show as a high school senior, and has been involved each year since coming to Emerson. He directed last year’s show, but this year he’s taking a step back and serving as engineer-in-charge, making sure everything on the broadcast side goes as planned.

It’s an enormous amount of work, Vahey said, with much of it concentrated during finals. But it also breeds a camaraderie and sense of purpose like little else, he said.

“If you’re in the dorms for that week [before the EVVYs], anyone you see in the hall is working on that show,” Vahey said. “The whole campus for that last week turns into EVVYville, and everyone you see around is working on that shared thing, and you kind of have that shared vision for that night of the show. It’s really cool.”

Vahey said he is also finding, as he’s been networking with alumni, that the EVVYs creates bonds that transcend class years. In conversations and job interviews, he’s frequently asked if he’s worked on the EVVYs. The implication being that if you did, you know what you’re doing.

Turbow said she’s been talking to a lot of alumni for a package they’re creating on the EVVYs history, and it’s been very easy to find common ground.

“We speak well with each other because we’re the people that are crazy enough to make this happen,” she said. “And the show doesn’t have to be put on. At the end of the day, it’s a student award show. But the people that are there are there because they’re passionate enough about it to make it happen.”

One of the original alumni “passionate enough to make it happen,” Glenn Meehan, said creating the EVVYs “completely defined” his Emerson experience for him.

“This is what’s so great about Emerson. We got to put on a show, and 45 years later, the show is still happening,” he said. “And I don’t think there’s any other school in the country that would’ve allowed two students to just come up with something that’s still around 45 years later, so I’m very proud of it.”