Barack Obama Becomes Second U.S. President To Win Emmy With ‘Our Great National Parks’ Triumph

Former U.S. President Barack Obama won his first Emmy for his narration of Netflix’s five-part documentary series, Our Great National Parks.

Grammy-winner Obama becomes the second President to win an Emmy, after Dwight Eisenhower, who was awarded a prize in 1956 while still in office, and the first to win a competitive award for a specific television project.

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Obama nabbed the Outstanding Narrator award at tonight’s Creative Arts Emmy ceremony, beating Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Black Patriots: Heroes of the Civil War), David Attenborough (The Mating Game), W. Kamau Bell (We Need to Talk About Cosby) and Lupita Nyong’o (Serengeti II) in a star-studded category.

He was also previously nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy in 2016 for David Attenborough Meets President Obama.

Obama wasn’t present at the awards and the Academy accepted on his behalf after RuPaul presented the category.

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In Our Great National Parks, produced by The Obamas’ production company Higher Ground, the former president and first lady Michelle Obama’s production company, shines the spotlight on some of the planet’s most spectacular national parks.

Freeborne Media and Wild Space Productions also produce the five-part series, which features locations as near and far as the Monterey Bay National Marine Aquarium in California, Tsavo, Kenya and Gunung Leuser National Park in Indonesia.

The series, which launched in April, forms part of the Obamas’ multi-year film and TV deal that the President and his wife struck with Netflix in 2018.