When PBS first went on the air more than 50 years ago, it was born out of a groundbreaking idea: that Americans deserve a non-commercial television service whose sole mission is to educate and inspire. Guided by that bold mission, public television has transformed communities and strengthened lives.  PBS programs have let us traverse with the wildlife of the Okavango Delta, solve mysteries, cook alongside culinary artists, fall in love and ask a million questions. PBS has educated, engaged and inspired viewers across America, one program at a time.

•       This 14-night itinerary offers travelers access to the very best of PBS.  We have invited PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff and husband, Bloomberg’s Al Hunt, to share their stories of reporting the news of the day in this heated political environment.  We will also feature Executive Producers from your favorite PBS shows who will look at the state of television and storytelling in today’s complex media marketplace.

•       Invitations are also out to PBS executives who will share highlights from 50 years of broadcasting the best of television and their vision for the future. 

•       All of the presentations will be non-partisan.  These presentations will be coupled with celebrations of arts, culture and history courtesy of filmmakers from PBS’ American Experience and American Masters.  

•       Meet and engage with these experts and their featured guests at panel discussions, presentations, as well as private dinners and cocktail receptions which allow for one-on-one interaction during the unforgettable voyage.

•       Spotlight programming and events: Beginning with a festive Welcome Reception, guests will have the opportunity to greet speakers and performers in-person, register for fascinating private dinners and hear more about the acclaimed work of public broadcasting entities from America. Lectures and special screenings will be offered on sea days and certain afternoons in port.  Several PBS films will be screened in the Constellation Theater and on 2 broadcast channels in guest cabins.  A special Group Dinner mid-way through the voyage will allow for an exclusive opportunity to meet other passengers with similar interests and also engage closely with speakers and performers following their time on stage. Both a Mid-cruise Reception and a Farewell Reception are also offered during this unique offering.  Additional on-board activities and custom shore excursions will be added soon.

Speakers/Entertainment:

Paula A. Kerger is president and chief executive officer of PBS, the nation’s largest non-commercial media organization with 350 member stations throughout the country.  Ms. Kerger joined PBS as its sixth president and chief executive in March 2006, and is the longest serving President in PBS history. Since her arrival, Ms. Kerger has made particularly strong commitments to the arts, news and public affairs, high-quality educational content for children and the classroom, diversity, and the use of new digital platforms to bring public media into the lives of all Americans.

Under Ms. Kerger’s leadership, PBS has been growing its audiences across genres, and platforms. In the course of a year, eighty-two percent of all television households in America watch PBS, and over seventy percent of all children watch PBS. And online, in 2015, Americans viewed more than five billion videos across all PBS digital platforms.  Among her accomplishments are the pop-culture phenomenon “Downton Abbey;” Ken Burns’s “The Roosevelts”; the original American drama series “Mercy Street”; acclaimed children’s programs such as “Peg+Cat,” and “Curious George”; and award-winning apps and online sites. PBS has also developed PBS LearningMedia, which provides educators with digital resources for the classroom.

In addition to leading PBS, Ms. Kerger is president of the PBS Foundation, an independent organization that raises private sector funding for PBS, and has become a significant source of revenue for new projects at PBS. Ms. Kerger is regularly included in the Hollywood Reporter’s “Women in Entertainment Power 100,” an annual survey of the nation’s top women executives in media. In 2005, she was named to the Women’s Forum, an organization of 300 leading women in New York’s arts and business scenes. In 2008, Ms. Kerger received the Woman of Achievement Award from Women in Development, New York. And in 2012, she was honored by Promax/BDA, B&C and Multichannel News with their 2012 Brand Builder Award.

Ms. Kerger received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Baltimore, where she serves on the Merrick School of Business Dean’s Advisory Council. She has received honorary doctorates from Washington University in St. Louis and Grand Valley State University. She is a director of the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and is Vice Chair of the board of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.  Ms. Kerger and her husband Joseph Kerger live in Round Hill, VA.

Broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff is the anchor and managing editor of the PBS NewsHour. She has covered politics and other news for five decades at NBC, CNN and PBS.  At PBS from 1983 to 1993, she was the chief Washington correspondent for the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. From 1984 – 1990, she also anchored PBS’ award-winning documentary series, “Frontline with Judy Woodruff.” Moving to CNN in 1993, she served as anchor and senior correspondent for 12 years; among other duties, she anchored the weekday program “Inside Politics.” She returned to the NewsHour in 2007, and in 2013, she and the late Gwen Ifill were named the first two women to co-anchor a national news broadcast. After Ifill’s death, Woodruff was named sole anchor.

Woodruff is a founding co-chair of the International Women’s Media Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting and encouraging women in journalism and communication industries worldwide. She serves on the boards of trustees of the Freedom Forum, The Duke Endowment and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and is a director of Public Radio International and the National Association to End Homelessness. She is a former member of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a former director of the National Museum of American History and a former trustee of the Urban Institute.  Judy is a graduate of Duke University, where she is a trustee emerita.

She is the recent recipient of the Radcliffe Medal, the Poynter Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism, the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism from Arizona State University. She received the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award in Television from Washington State University, the Gaylord Prize for Excellence in Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of Oklahoma and the Al Neuharth Award for Excellence in the Media from the University of South Dakota. She was inducted into the Georgia Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame and received the Leonard Zeidenberg First Amendment Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association and the Duke Distinguished Alumni Award, among others.  She is the recipient of more than 25 honorary degrees.

Judy lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, journalist Al Hunt, and they are the parents of three children: Jeffrey, Benjamin and Lauren.

Albert Reinhold Hunt Jr. was born on January 1, 1942 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hunt graduated from The Haverford School in Haverford, Pennsylvania in 1960 and earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1965. Prior to graduating from Wake Forest University, Al worked for the newspapers The Philadelphia Bulletin and The Winston-Salem Journal. Hunt became a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York in 1965. He transferred to the paper’s Boston, Massachusetts bureau in 1967 before transferring a second time to the Washington, D.C. bureau two years later. Al worked in the Washington bureau for The Wall Street Journal for thirty-five years: During this time Hunt was a national and congressional reporter, a bureau chief, and, later on, executive Washington editor. Moreover, Al wrote the weekly column “Politics & People” for eleven years as well as directed the paper’s political polls for twenty years and served as president of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund and was a board member of the Dow Jones subsidiary Ottawa Newspapers, Inc.

Hunt joined Bloomberg News in January, 2005. Al became a regular feature reporter for the long-running talk show Charlie Rose (1991) with the segment “Al Hunt on the Story” in October, 2014. In addition, Hunt not only is a member of the Wake Forest board of trustees, the board of the Children’s Charities in Washington, and the advisory board of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University, but also has taught a course on the press and politics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communications. Among the awards Al has won are a Raymond Clapper Award for Washington reporting in 1976, the Allen H. Neuharth Award for Excellence in Journalism from the University of South Dakota in 1995, and a national citation from the William Allen White Foundation in 1999. He’s the co-author of the books The American Elections of 1980, The American Elections of 1982, The American Elections of 1984, and Elections American Style. Married to news anchor Judy Woodruff since 1980, Hunt is the father of three children: Daughter Lauren Ann and sons Jeffrey and Benjamin.

Michael Kantor joined American Masters as the PBS series’ executive producer in 2014. He created the American Masters Podcast as well as the theatrical imprint American Masters Pictures which has been represented by ten films at the Sundance Film Festival over the past five years including Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise; Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am; and Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir. This year’s festival featured the world premiere of the American Masters film, Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It, which Kantor executive produced with Norman Lear and Lin-Manuel Miranda.  

An Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, Kantor’s PBS series include Broadway: The American Musical (hosted by Julie Andrews), Make ‘Em Laugh (hosted by Billy Crystal) and Superheroes (hosted by Liev Schreiber). Kantor also wrote, directed and produced the American Masters program, Quincy Jones: In the Pocket and the Peabody-winning special, Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy.  He served as executive producer of Give Me the Banjo with Steve Martin and is president of Almo Inc., a company that distributes the American Film Theatre series, including Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, starring Katharine Hepburn, and Chekhov’s Three Sisters with Laurence Olivier. Kantor has co-authored three books, serves as a Tony nominator and lectures frequently.

Lois Vossen is the Executive Producer of Independent Lens and has been with the show since its inception as a primetime series on PBS. Lois is responsible for commissioning new films, programming the series and working with filmmakers on editorial and broadcast issues. Independent Lens films have received 25 Emmy Awards, 23 George Foster Peabody Awards, 5 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Journalism Awards and 9 Academy Award nominations. The series was honored in 2013, 2014, 2015  and 2017 with the International Documentary Association (IDA) Award for Best Series. Before joining ITVS, Lois was the Associate Managing Director of Sundance Film Festival and Sundance Labs. Lois is on the Television Academy Board of Governors, representing the documentary branch and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AMPAS). She has served on the jury at Shanghai Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, SXSW, DOC New Zealand and Palm Springs International Film Festival, among others.

Under her leadership, films funded or co-produced by Independent Lens include I Am Not Your Negro, Always in Season, Bedlam, One Child Nation, Black Memorabilia, The King, People’s Republic of Desire, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, TOWER, Newtown, Best of Enemies, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, (T)ERROR, The House I Live In, The Invisible War, and The Trials of Muhammad Ali, among many others.

*An additional speaker to be announced soon. 

To join the group: Spotlight lectures, dinners, and cocktail parties, all unrivaled experiences – are open to all Regent guests at no extra charge.  Join our “community at sea” by mentioning the group code “SPO” (for Spotlight)  at the time of booking or add this experience to your “On Board Options” via Destination Services to reflect your interest in attending Spotlight on Public Broadcasting events so we can keep you advised of related activities while you are on board.  A programming agenda will be delivered to your suite upon embarkation and exclusive invitations to activities and events will be sent to your suite throughout the journey. You will then have the choice to determine which events to attend or participate.