Susan Gard was recently nominated for two 2025 Suncoast Emmy® Awards for WGCU Untold Stories: Sanibel Island's Store (Documentary - Historical) and Rising: Surviving the Surge (Documentary - Topical). Susan is an associate producer at WGCU, a small local PBS/NPR station in Fort Myers, Florida while pursuing the online MA Media Producing program. Read our interview with Susan to learn more about her:
How long have you been a producer?
I have been producing professionally since 2008.
Did you always want to be a producer or did your creative work and experiences lead you in that direction?
I have wanted to be a producer since high school. I have always loved films, and I have a very analytical way of thinking, so I want to know how something works. When I learned how many moving parts it takes to make a film, I was hooked because it seemed like the ultimate challenge. I’m sure that sounds odd, but in my experience, the best, most rewarding moments in life have come with a great deal of hard work. When I tell people what I do, they think it’s so easy and fun to be in a creative field, but they have no idea how hard the work can really be. That being said, I think this work is the most fun when the pressure is on.
As an associate producer in the documentary unit of WGCU, please tell us about your process for bringing those important stories and narratives to life.
WGCU is a small local PBS/NPR station in Fort Myers, FL. While we benefit from the monikers of PBS and NPR, it is entirely up to us to secure funding and an audience for our programming. Typically, our documentaries are funded through grants and individual donations. We choose our topics based on the educational and historical importance of each story, and we usually go with evergreen issues that affect our broadcast area — 12 counties in Southwest Florida. While the exact process for each doc varies, it always starts with interviewing as many people as possible and seeing if they have any visuals to accompany their stories. With frequent storms and a population that moves frequently, Florida's history is notoriously difficult to visually represent. That said, there is an incredible state archive we use often, but we always prefer first-hand visuals.
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You were recently nominated for two 2025 Suncoast Emmy® Awards for WGCU Untold Stories: Sanibel Island's Store and Rising: Surviving the Surge. Please tell us about developing these projects and the effects these stories have had on communities.
Working on both these projects has been incredibly rewarding to me. I am not a Florida native, and while I visited this area when I was growing up, I was not knowledgeable about its rich history. I treated these projects as a way for me to learn more about my adoptive home.
Sanibel Island’s Store was a fascinating experience of immersing myself in the community that is Sanibel Island. While many know of the island, few know the way it came to be, from the farmers who moved to the island to try to farm the land, to the shipwrecked man who washed up on shore and lived by himself for years before finding a way off the island, only to come back and become the island’s first realtor. We weren’t able to fit all those fantastic stories into our documentary. Still, through talking to community members, we found the story of the oldest-running family-owned business in Florida. We couldn’t have done it without the exceptional cooperation of the family who still owns and operates the store, or what’s left of it. We felt this story was important due to the impact the family and business have had on the community's development, as well as for the many visuals that illustrate the family's and the island's history.
Rising: Surviving the Surge was one of the most challenging projects I have taken on. The subject was intended to be educational rather than sensational, but how do you not use the impactful imagery that came out of such a horrific event? We were funded by the Florida Humanities, which mandated that we find stories featuring first-person experiences. This created one of the most involved projects regarding finding and acquiring footage. We had a healthy budget to procure footage from storm chasers, but we also did call-outs for anyone who had footage that hadn’t been seen before. We had hundreds of submissions, and we did not use everything we got. Watching the first-person videos and hearing audio recordings of people desperate for help was heart-wrenching. In the end, we decided it was important to tell the story in a way that, even though it weighed heavily on our hearts as we went through the storm too, it still left us with a sense of hope for the future.
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You’re currently in your first semester of the online MA in Media Producing program. How is your coursework connected to your role developing stories at WGCU?
I find the coursework for the MA program to be right on par with my work developing stories. The level of detail that NYU includes in its courses far exceeds what I have experienced with any other program. One of the aspects I am most interested in learning is funding, because, as I said, financing at my current position typically comes from grants or individual donations. Knowing how to find funding will only help me when I have a project I want to produce, where the station may or may not be able to secure financing. I am excited to see what opportunities this degree will open for me at my current station and beyond.
What’s next? What types of projects are you working on now?
One of the best parts of being an Associate Producer at WGCU is the opportunity to wear many hats. I am currently working on a documentary about a plane that crashed on the local interstate in February of 2024. The passengers and the flight attendant made it out, but sadly, both pilots did not. We also have a weekly news show where I am part of the crew. Our goal is to move the show from a weekly to a daily format, which is more work than we have staff to handle, due to funding cuts, so I split my time between the doc and the news. I have never done the news, so this is an exciting experience to be part of building this show from the ground up.