SFSU alumna wins Creative Arts Emmy Award for hit documentary

San Francisco State University couldn’t be a better place to learn about global culture, diversity and politics. For alumna Poh Si Teng, this campus fostered her journalistic pursuits from the classroom to Malcolm X Plaza, where you can see SFSU’s social justice ethos come to life. Teng (B.A., ’07) won her first Emmy Award earlier this month, as an executive producer of “Patrice: The Movie,” honored for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking at the Creative Arts ceremony. 

“Truly, I couldn’t have chosen a better university and home,” Teng said. “I think back on all the classes and all the professors and all the protests and movements that I was part of, and I’m so proud and glad that I went to SF State.” 

Teng entered SFSU as an international student from Malaysia. She wrote for the Golden Gate Xpress, the University’s student-run newspaper, and she appreciates the diverse, supportive faculty members in the Department of Journalism, including Cristina Azocar, Erna Smith and Venise Wagner. Teng also credits SFSU with helping her land numerous internships that propelled her career.  

“I think about my time at SF State a lot,” she says. “It is foundational to who I am today. I’m so glad that was the first place I landed in the United States, which led me to the path of being a journalist, and then documentary filmmaker.” 

Teng would become a reporter for The New York Times, where she garnered her first Emmy nomination, and later, a documentary commissioner for Al Jazeera English, where she was nominated for an Academy Award for the documentary short “St. Louis Superman.” After a decade in journalism, she left the newsroom and became a grants director for the International Documentary Association. At IDA she created a grant for filmmakers with disabilities, with the support of the Ford Foundation. It was her time working with the disability film community that led her to championing “Patrice: The Movie” at ABC News/Disney. The documentary follows a disabled couple who risk losing their benefits if they get engaged or married. Teng was the lead creative executive at ABC News/Disney who brought the film to Hulu. 

Last year, Teng left her position at Disney/ABC to start her own production company. She is producing a three-part docuseries that she developed, and she is directing a political and medical verité film that is set in the U.S. and Gaza. 

“SFSU gave me the real-life experience of being close to the issues that mattered,” she said, “because the students were living them, whether it was the struggle to pay rent, the fight for disability rights or the weight of America’s foreign wars. I learned not just what to care about, but how to fight. That education continues to guide my work today.” 

Learn more about the SFSU Department of Journalism.