Inside HBCU Week: A Conversation with Maryland Public Television's Travis Mitchell

The Truth In This Art is an interview series featuring artists, entrepreneurs and tastemakers in & around Baltimore.

Travis Mitchell serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Content Officer at Maryland Public Television. He oversees all content created, acquired, and aired on the statewide public television network's TV channels and online properties. Having amassed more than three decades of experience as an executive in commercial and public media, Mitchell earned an undergraduate degree in broadcast journalism from Morgan State University, an HBCU based in Baltimore, MD, and a master’s degree in entrepreneurship and education from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education in Philadelphia. He completed further executive education study at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mr. has served on the foundation board of Morgan State University and as a member of PBS Children’s Media and Education Working Group and the National Cable Television Association Policy Issues Committee. Most recently Mitchell became the Chair of the Advisory Board for Morgan State University's School of Global Journalism and Communications. In 2021, Mr. Mitchell was appointed to the Board of Trustees at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he also received an honorary doctor of humane letters from the university in recognition of his more than 25 years of service to the community as a media and non-profit executive. During his career he has been the executive-in-charge of production for over 200 televised HBCU football and basketball games on nationwide cable television. A two-time executive producer of Emmy-Award winning films about HBCUs, including the nationally distributed Shaw Rising, Mitchell is the founder of HBCU Week on MPT, the first weeklong primetime schedule dedicated exclusively to HBCUs in American television history, now in its fourth season. He is currently working with the Corporation of Public Broadcasting that Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) to expand HBCU Week to nationwide PBS audiences beginning this Fall with a long-term goal to produce a film about every HBCU in the nation within 10 years.