Following the execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner KUED’s UtahNow team explores questions of justice and mercy in: Condemned. Watch the entire show online!
Tonight at 9:55pm, Weldon J. Taylor Executive Lecture Series
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About KUED
Mary Dickson
Creative Services Director
Mary Dickson is the Director of Creative Services at KUED Channel 7, the Utah PBS affiliate, a position she has held for the past 18 years. She oversees the station’s community outreach, Web, promotions, publicity, media relations and advertising services and publishes the monthly program guide, Seven. She also is the on-air host of Contact, which airs weeknights on KUED. Under her direction, the station has won a variety of local and national promotion and outreach awards, including Emmy and New York Film Festival Awards as well as those from PBS and the Utah Broadcasters Association.
Dickson serves on the advisory board of the National Center for Outreach, which develops outreach campaigns and strategies for the PBS system. She is also on the communication council of the National Educational Television Association. She has served on the PBS Program Management Advisory Group, a group of public television professionals who serve as a sounding board to discuss program and promotion issues, and on the PBS Communications Advisory Council, which offers promotional advice to PBS. She is the co-author of “Promotion in Public Television and Radio” in the college textbook, Promotion and Marketing for Broadcasting, Cable and the Web.
She team teaches a course on Media Literacy for the University of Utah Honors program and is a past president of the Utah Society of Professional Journalists and a founding board member of Utah’s Women in News. She was named 2008 Wasatch Woman of the Year in Community.
In addition to her full-time position with the public television station, she is an award-winning writer whose wide-ranging articles, commentary and editorials appear regularly in a variety of publications throughout the West. Her full-length play, Exposed, opened Plan B Theatre’s 2007-2008 season, where it played to sold-out houses and rave reviews. It has been nominated by the American Theatre Critics Association for the Steinberg Award for Best New Play Produced Outside New York. It also was named Best Drama of 2007 by the Deseret Morning News.
Dickson is the writer and co- producer of the national PBS documentary film, No Safe Place: Violence Against Women, which has received a variety of awards including an Emmy nomination and a Gold Award from the Houston WorldFest International Film Festival. she was one of 10 writers commissioned to write a short play (Eager) for performance and publication as part of Cowboys, Cabbies and the Tree of the Weeping Virgin, presented as part of the 2002 Winter Olympics by Salt Lake Acting Company. She was a writer in residence at the Mesa Refuge in Point Reyes, California in 2005, where she completed a book-length manuscript that became the basis for her play, Exposed.
Her commentary has been heard on public radio station KUER-FM-90. Her essay “Downwinders All” appears in the anthology Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader along with essays by Barbara Kingsolver and Terry Tempest-Williams. Her extended essay, “Living and Dying with Fallout” appeared in the June 2005 issue of the journal Dialogue, and received the journal’s Best Article of the Year award. Her essays and poetry were included in the art exhibit, "Suffering in Silence" and “Modern Love” at Art Access Gallery. Her commentary, "Woman's Worst Fear," received the Vivian Castleberry Award from the National Association of Women Journalists. She has performed locally in “And the Banned Played On” with Plan B Theatre and “The Vagina Monologues” at Kingsbury Hall, both as fundraisers for Utah non-profits. She also performed her monologue, “Tea and Tulips” as part of “The Mommy Monologues” at the University of Utah.
For more than a decade she wrote award-winning film reviews for Salt Lake City Weekly, Utah's alternative press. She also reviewed films for the KSL-Radio Movie Show and Fox-TV among others.
She has received a variety of writing awards including those from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press, National Broadcasters Association, and the National Association of Women Journalists. She is a recipient of the Quintus Wilson Distinguished Alumnus Award at the University of Utah and a recipient of the University’s Presidential Staff Award.
She serves on the Board of Directors of the University Publications Council, Plan B Theatre, the Barbara L. and Norman C. Tanner Center for Nonviolent Human Rights Advocacy, the High Road for Human Rights Education Foundation and the Utah Valley State College Peace and Justice Program. She is a past board member of the National Conference on Community and Justice, the Lupus Foundation, Salt Lake Acting Company, Utah Peace Institute, the Utah Council for Citizen Diplomacy and the Utah Film and Video Center. She continues to serve as a host and professional resource for international visitors through the State Department as a member of the UCCD.
