The 2026 Storyteller Awards: This Year’s Winners

The Storyteller Awards are back for year three, and this year’s crop of visual storytellers might be the best yet. We dug through every nomination, and now it’s time to meet the winners.

Join us in celebrating the brands and creators behind the most memorable visual stories.

🏆 Best Social Media Campaign: Wisconsin Athletics

🏆 Best Community Engagement: Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital

🏆 AI for Efficiency: Atlanta Braves

🏆 Sports Storyteller of the Year: Josh Lavallee

🏆 Higher Ed Storyteller of the Year: UT Knoxville Turfgrass Experts

Learn more about the winners and check out the runners-up and finalists below.

Best Social Media Campaign: Wisconsin Athletics

The Campaign

Wisconsin men’s hockey hadn’t won a title since 2006, so when this year’s team caught fire in the tournament, the social team built the run around fan-first storytelling. They leaned into a “Cinderella story” to build excitement, mixing cinematic recaps with lo-fi behind-the-scenes content.

When their captain dropped an accidental f-bomb on national TV, followed by an “ope, sorry,” they didn’t cut around it, they embraced it, and it became one of the run’s most human moments. Their goal throughout the tournament was to make fans feel like they were traveling with the team, not just watching from home. And they succeeded.

The Impact

• 29.59 million views and 1.21 million interactions across the full NCAA Tournament run
• 16.91 million views and 713.5k engagements during the Frozen Four alone
• 10k+ new followers gained, even after falling just short of the title

Meet the Finalists:

Runner-Up: East Carolina University 🏅

A simple idea that turned into ECU’s biggest social media hit: put a mic in front of students, give them a prompt, and let them talk. From viral videos riffing on Wicked and Hannah Montana to raw reactions on Match Day, the series racked up millions of views and even landed a segment on NBC Nightly News.

University of New Haven

A fun campaign bringing in internet-famous Doug the Pug to “enroll,” graduate, and even collaborate with UNewHaven’s Boston Dynamics robot. The campaign pulled in hundreds of thousands of views on social and was featured in People Magazine.

Best Community Engagement: Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital

The Campaign

In February 2026, East Tennessee Children’s Hospital announced it would become Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital, and treated the launch as a moment to bring the whole community together.

An announcement video with Dolly and CEO Matt Schaefer brought in thousands of comments from families and fans across every major platform on social. Behind the scenes, employees got their own moment first: a private town hall with a personalized message from Dolly just before the public reveal. The whole effort was built to make patients, families, staff, and donors feel like part of the story.

The Impact

• A national broadcast on the TODAY Show, reaching ~3 million live viewers and 13 million online
• Over 3,000 media stories and 10.5 billion impressions, from People and AP to major Tennessee outlets
• A campaign that turned a name change into a community-wide moment of pride and trust

Meet the Finalists:

Runner-Up: Kent State University 🏅

The team at Kent State covered five commencement ceremonies, each as their own event, delivering dedicated recaps and photo galleries within minutes of them wrapping up. This brought their community together in the moment to celebrate the special occasion and delight students and their families.

AMN Healthcare

AMN Healthcare ran a month-long campaign built entirely around saying thank you to the people doing the work. For Nurses Month, they hosted giveaways, shared stories & resources, and collected messages from nurses sharing their “why.”

AI for Efficiency: Atlanta Braves

The Campaign

With the 2026 All-Star Game landing in Philadelphia, the Braves leaned into the city’s historical roots for their Vote Braves campaign. Using AI, they turned player photos into oil paintings that look straight out of 1776, giving them the full Founding Father treatment. It was a fast, efficient way to create a fun, on-theme visual campaign without a full photoshoot or illustration team.

The Impact

• Portraits featured across all Braves digital platforms to drive All-Star voting
• Printed on canvas and displayed at the ballpark and Atlanta’s High Museum
• Turned into posters and baseball cards, given away to fans as a voting reminder

Meet the Finalists:

Runner-Up: Tennessee Titans 🏅

The Titans have a media library of over 1.6 million visuals. Instead of tagging them by hand, they’re using AI to make the entire archive searchable and self-service. Now employees can find what they need themselves, freeing up the creative team from hours of manual searching to focus on actual creative work.

Sporting Kansas City

Sporting KC’s archive spans nearly two decades and approaches a million assets. Using AI-powered visual search, auto-tagging, and facial recognition, the team is surfacing images in seconds, even content that was never manually keyworded. It’s turned a massive library into something they can actually use every day.

Sports Storyteller of the Year: Josh Lavallee

Josh photographed every single 2026 playoff game for the Carolina Hurricanes, home and away, rigging up to seven remote cameras per game to capture angles that are rarely seen across the league. The payoff was worth it, documenting the franchise’s first Stanley Cup in 20 years, executed with a level of quality and quantity that will leave its mark on hockey history for years to come.

Why Josh deserves the recognition:

• Installed and triggered up to seven remotes per game, on the road and at home, a scale unmatched by any team photographer in hockey
• Captured the full arc of a historic 16-3 playoff run that delivered Carolina’s first Stanley Cup in two decades
• Produced a body of work that defined the team’s look and feel behind the scenes, creating a visual record that will outlast the season and Josh’s tenure with the Hurricanes.

Meet the Finalists:

Runner-Up: University of Maryland Athletics 🏅

Year-round, Michael Rovetto, Joey Kurtz & Dominick Acierno from Maryland Athletics lean into human-interest stories about the athletes at Maryland instead of focusing on the scoreboard. Each story comes to life across web, video, and social graphics, with a different angle for every channel, leaving an impact everywhere fans are watching.

Philadelphia 76ers

Maggie Zerbe & Max Molina from the 76ers content team brought back a piece of Sixers history: the iconic black jersey from the Allen Iverson-era 2001 Finals team. Together, through creative marketing and storytelling, they turned a jersey reveal into a moment the whole fanbase was talking about.

Higher Ed Storyteller of the Year: UT Knoxville Turfgrass Experts

When FIFA needed research to make 16 World Cup pitches play the same across three countries and four climate zones, they turned to UT’s turfgrass scientists, a first-of-its-kind partnership between academia and international soccer. To tell that story, UT’s communications team built a dedicated microsite blending video, photography, and long-form storytelling, treating their turfgrass researchers like the rockstars they are.

Why they deserve the recognition:

• They turned a niche research program into a globally relevant story, earning coverage from the New York Times, BBC, and Wall Street Journal
• The microsite topped Google search results for turfgrass research within weeks, without any social promotion
• They proved university research storytelling can hold its own on the world’s biggest sports stage, working directly with FIFA at every step

Meet the Finalists:

Runner-Up: William Rosen from Marist University 🏅

Known as “the voice of Marist Athletics,” this rising senior hosts a student sports broadcast on ESPN+ and has an impressive resume interviewing athletes and mentoring young broadcasters, all before graduating.

College of the Sequoias Marketing Team

This team turned their college’s 100th anniversary into a short film carving a giant sequoia into a larger-than-life sculpture. It resulted in a symbolic message and a living metaphor for the student journey from raw material to something special.