Well established as a leading storyteller working in unscripted television, Emmy Award winner Bill Pruitt began his career working for Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute. One of the founders of Sundance invited him to attend the Columbia University School of the Arts where he studied screenwriting and directing. He was awarded several academic fellowships to develop the producing curriculum and received an MFA with honors. He wrote and directed several award-winning short films that screened at Cannes, Sundance, LA Filmfest, and Houston Worldfest where he won the Bronze Medal for his film “Bolo”. His feature length thesis screenplay, “Dry Cycle”, was produced by Newmark Films in 2004, starring Ione Skye, Sam Ball and Marisa Coughlan.
After receiving his MFA from Columbia, he took to the road, producing television all around the world for HBO, CBS, NBC, MTV, Nat Geo, History, Animal Planet, Discovery, Vice and Amazon Prime filming on nearly every continent on the planet. In 2012, he created and developed Weed Country, a six-part series for Discovery.
Pruitt has been nominated four times by the Producers Guild of America as Outstanding Non-Fiction Producer of the Year and won the Excellence Award from the Factual Entertainment Forum as showrunner of the hit Discovery series Deadliest Catch. The American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences nominated him six times—twice in one year–for the Primetime Emmy Award. He won the Emmy four years in a row as Supervising Producer of The Amazing Race. His first-ever digital series, Eat the World with Emeril Lagasse, was nominated for the prestigious James Beard Foundation Award, the Realscreen Award, five Daytime Emmy Awards and won the Emmy for Best Culinary Series in 2017.