Lost LA, the USC Libraries' co-production with PBS SoCal, has won the 2023 Belva Davis American Scene Award for its "From Little Tokyo to Crenshaw" episode. The award, presented biannually by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), honors news and broadcast productions for their diverse and inclusive programming.
"From Little Tokyo to Crenshaw" tells how Japanese Americans returning from World War II incarceration camps rebuilt their community in Los Angeles’s Crenshaw district. It originally aired in April 2022 as part of Lost LA's fifth season. The series, which explores Southern California history through archival collections, premiered in 2016 as a unique collaboration between a university research library and a public media company. Its sixth season debuted earlier this year with episodes about fast food, Filipino Americans, and tuberculosis sanitariums, among other subjects.
Previous winners of the Belva Davis American Scene Award for News and Broadcast include ABC News's 20/20, NPR's Code Switch podcast, and Detroit Public Television.
You can watch the presentation of the 2023 American Scene Awards, hosted by Margaret Cho and Peppermint, here.