The cliché goes that as Emmy Award nominees anxiously await their category to be called, it’s important to remember that it’s an honor just to be nominated. For the Savannah College of Art and Design students, who created and produced the docuseries Chef ATL, the odds were further stacked against them last month at the 2026 Southeast Emmy Awards held at the Grand Hyatt in Buckhead. Two of their episodes had been nominated in the Lifestyle Long-Form category.
“They were both very strong episodes, but I feared that we would split the votes,” explains Quinn Orear, SCAD Chair of Television, who oversees production of Chef ATL. And then Orear and his students found themselves on stage when the Global Soul episode of the series featuring Atlanta’s Twisted Soul chef/owner Deborah VanTrece and poet Jon Goode won. “It was a shock, a surprise but a good one,” says Orear. “We had over 300 students across 20 majors work on the series plus a dozen faculty supervise on it so to be able to go up on stage and represent all of those people was really was an honor.”
A fresh episode of the student-produced Emmy-winning series featuring The Consulate chef-owner Mei Lin and her husband, interior designer-owner Douglas Hines, will air Thursday, June 25 on WABE-TV at 9 and 11:30 p.m.
A brainchild of SCAD founder Paula Wallace, Chef ATL provides an opportunity for students to work across majors to produce the show that examines and celebrates the diversity of Atlanta’s food scene and its chefs, including VanTrece, Miller Union’s Steven Statterfield, The Deer and the Dove’s Terry Koval and others. The college’s casting majors even select the on-camera student talent for the series.
Thanks in part to the show’s Emmy win, SCAD graduate Jaden Lanfrank is spending the summer in Jersey City, NJ working on the set of an upcoming Netflix film. “I owe so much to Chef ATL and to SCAD at large because the experience that I got on the Chef ATL set really shaped the real-world experiences to become a better producer and showrunner,” says Lanfrank. “Every time the chefs would come onto our set, beforehand, they would have a little bit of reservation, just because it’s a student-produced thing. They would keep it a little bit at arm’s length, not having expectations too high. But when they finished the first day in our studio, every single chef without fail told us, ‘This is better than any industry project I’ve been a part of.’ Being a part of that definitely gives someone like me fresh out of school, a lot of credibility.”
For Astrid Sims, who graduated from SCAD last month, Chef ATL has provided a blueprint to a broadcast career in Atlanta. As a freshman, because her two roommates were working on the show’s inaugural episode, Sims helped out as a production assistant doing food prep. She loved the experience so much, she wanted to do more.
Sims recalls, “I summoned all of my sophomore courage to go up to my professor, and ask, ‘Can I have a big role in this episode?’ and he surprisingly said yes.” Sims went on to write the Emmy-winning script for Global Soul and ended up directing two additional episodes. The experience also netted her the 2026 Gracie Award for student TV directing, handed out June 16 in New York by the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation.
With her diploma still in a moving box, Sims says she’s grateful for the vast array of experiences working on Chef ATL as she now transitions into the professional world. “As a young person, you always dream about receiving an Emmy, an Academy Award or whatnot,” says Sim. “Those dreams always seem so far away. I just graduated but this experience really just shows me that these things truly are attainable.”
A new episode of Chef ATL, featuring The Consulate restaurant airs Thursday, June 25 at 9 p.m. on WABE-TV. The first seven episodes of Chef ATL, a collaboration between SCAD and WABE, who distributes the series, can be viewed on the WABE website and on PBS passport.
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Rich Eldredge
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