Pat Mitchell

Pat Mitchell was named president and chief executive officer of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in March 2000. She is the first woman and first producer to oversee the operations of the nation's only noncommercial media enterprise, created and owned by 349 member stations whose mission is to enrich the lives of all Americans and strengthen social capital in the communities they serve. Mitchell brings to the post a distinguished and varied background as a former network correspondent, award-winning producer, Turner/Time Warner executive, college-level educator, and outspoken advocate on women's and environmental issues.

Mitchell has emerged as one of public broadcasting's most dynamic and influential leaders. She is credited with revitalizing the PBS National Program Service with a new primetime schedule and bold new series, including American Family, broadcast television's first Latino drama, and NOW with Bill Moyers, a new weekly series on current affairs. During her tenure, she has also led a major strategic alliance with National Public Radio to create and cross-promote television, radio and online content; further integrated local and national content across all distribution platforms; and taken a creative, fresh approach to helping local public television stations grow their base of membership and support, diversify their audience and broaden their impact.

Under her leadership, Forbes magazine named PBS one of the "Magnetic 40" companies, a first for PBS. The Hollywood Reporter cited Mitchell as one of this year's "most influential female executives in the entertainment industry," and Washingtonian magazine named her one of Washington's "Most Powerful Women." In addition, last spring she was inducted into the Business Hall of Fame at Georgia State University and recognized as one of the University of Georgia's Distinguished Alumnae and honored as Women of the Year by Women in Cable and Telecommunications.

Long active in community and nonprofit organizations, Mitchell serves on the Sundance Institute's board of trustees, the Women's Leadership Advisory Council of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the National Board of Girls Inc, the Washington Area Women's Foundation, and is a Trustee of the Mayo Clinic. She is also one of the founding members of the American chapter of Mikhail Gorbachev's environmental organization, Green Cross International. This year, Mitchell was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Bank of America and the Knight Ridder Company, she was also invited to by the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs to be a member of the newly established US/Afghan Women's Council.

Mitchell lectures widely on women's issues and the role of media and in shaping ideas and values as well as the mission of public television to enrich the lives of individuals and to build social capital in the communities served by public television stations. She also lectures widely on women's issues as well as the role of television and popular culture in shaping ideas and values.

Mitchell came to PBS from Turner/Time Warner, where she was president of CNN Productions and Time Inc. Television. In that position, she was responsible for developing, commissioning and supervising original, nonfiction programming projects for CNN, TBS and other Turner and Time Warner networks and businesses. She also developed and supervised new television extensions of Time Inc. magazines. Ms. Mitchell was a member of the Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. Executive Committee and the CNN Executive Committee.

Under Mitchell's leadership, her division produced more than 500 hours of acclaimed documentaries and specials for TBS and CNN, including the Peabody-winning 24-hour documentary series Cold War, and Millennium: A Thousand Years of History. She also created extensive award-winning Web sites to accompany both series. Other major programs produced during her tenure include A Century of Women; Moon Shot; The Coming Plague; Dying to Tell the Story, as well as National Geographic EXPLORER series, Wild!Life Adventure specials and other natural history and environmental programming. Ms. Mitchell also initiated an international strategy for licensing documentary programming to global broadcasters and developed co-production relationships with broadcast, cable and satellite companies around the world. Documentaries produced under Ms. Mitchell's direction have won more than 100 major awards and received two Academy Award nominations.

She came to TBS Inc. in 1992 from VU Productions, an independent production company based at Paramount Studios, which she founded with three other partners. Under that banner, Mitchell created and developed reality series, specials and documentaries, among them, a frontline investigation of the role of women on the frontlines of conflicts in Northern Ireland, El Salvador and the Middle East.

Pat Mitchell began her television career in Boston at WBZ-TV, producing Impact News Specials. She was also a news anchor, reporter and host of a program for women. In 1977, she relocated to Washington, D.C., where she became the first woman to host Panorama, a two-hour live news and interview program. She won an Emmy for her work on that show.

During her two decades as a broadcast journalist, she worked for NBC, CBS, and ABC as a news reporter, anchor, talk show host, producer and program executive. In the mid-eighties, Mitchell launched her own nationally syndicated series, Woman to Woman, becoming the first woman to host a national talk show and to produce it out of her own company, Pat Mitchell Productions. In 1984, the program was awarded the EMMY for Most Outstanding Talk Program.

Mitchell was also a correspondent for NBC's Today program, where she was a substitute host for Jane Pauley as well as hosting a weekly Woman to Woman segment and she was the arts correspondent for CBS's Sunday Morning. She also developed television programs for national syndication and cable for Columbia Studios, Lifetime Cable Network, Golden West Television, and Group W television, including Hour Magazine, which she also hosted.

Before her television career, Mitchell was a writer/researcher for Look magazine. Prior to that she taught English and drama at the University of Georgia and Virginia Commonwealth University. She also led a Women in Politics course at Harvard University's Institute of Politics.

A magna cum laude graduate of the University of Georgia with a master's degree in English literature, Mitchell received an honorary doctoral degree from Emerson College in Boston, MA in May 2001. A Georgia native, she is a resident of Atlanta, GA and Washington, DC, and is married to Scott Seydel, an Atlanta businessman. Together, they have six children and five grandchildren.