As the senior talent relations and events manager for the Disney Company, alumna Morgan Epperson introduces television casts from the U.S. to markets in the UK and across Europe.
It’s a big job, but Epperson, ’15, has been preparing for it since her days at USC’s College of Information and Communications. Networking with alumni in the entertainment industry got her a foot in the door. Extracurricular activities on campus gave her a leg up. A can-do attitude allowed her to take advantage of opportunities and run with them.
This spring, for example, she shepherded the cast of The Testaments, the Hulu-produced dystopian sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, from a Paris press conference to the global premiere at the world’s largest international television festival, Series Mania, in Lille, France. The talent tour then moved on to London for a screening and a press junket, along with a big influencer event where Epperson and her staff transformed a local school into a likeness of the school featured in the show.
A few months earlier, the cast of Hulu’s All’s Fair, a legal drama series starring Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts and Glenn Close, headed to Europe for red carpet screenings and promotional press conferences in London and Paris.
“It’s really fun. It’s really exciting. And it’s very hard work,” says Epperson.
Epperson grew up a theater kid 45 minutes north of Chicago. But rather than run toward the bright lights of the big city, she stepped back. When most of her classmates chose to attend Big 10 schools, she headed to a small liberal arts college in North Carolina.
It didn’t take long for her to know she wanted something different. She found it at USC while visiting a friend from high school. The size, the opportunities and the vibe felt right. She transferred to Carolina as a sophomore — and wasted no time submersing herself in what USC had to offer.
A visual communications major in the College of Information and Communications, she hunted down opportunities to hone the skills she was learning in class and quickly found them at Garnet & Black. There, she learned that the student magazine’s founder, alumnus Jason Wagenheim, had gone on to become the vice president and publisher of Teen Vogue magazine —a publication where Epperson had dreamed of working.
“This man went to USC, created this magazine and was working at my dream publication,” she says. “He was very amenable to talking to me because I was a USC student. It was an incredible moment of getting to connect with alumni.”
While she was in New York that summer as part of Teen Vogue University, she was able to make an in-person connection with Wagenheim.
“He set up a formal meeting in New York, and it was just life-changing for me to see the impact of being an alumnus and using your power for good and really trying to help the next generation,” she says. “That really helped me understand how to communicate with people who are in the real world and have really big jobs. And as someone who was going to school at USC, I was so proud of it.”
She also understood that launching a career in arts and entertainment would take a little extra effort — especially when you don’t attend school in New York or Los Angeles.
“Talking to him made me know everything was possible,” she says. “And it helped develop how I was also going to dive into different organizations at school, too.”
Dive in she did. In addition to Garnet & Black, there was Fashion Board, an internship with the Columbia Museum of Art, a job working at the Strom Thurmond Wellness and Fitness Center. Study abroad in Paris made her want to live and work in Europe one day. A summer internship in the publicity department at Nickelodeon in California put her on the path to make that happen.
“I’d always loved Nickelodeon as a kid,” she says. “I wanted to be an actor on the channel. And (during the internship) I got to work with those kids and bring them to do interviews and things like that. And it was just such a joy. I realized that was what really made sense for me in the long run.”
Then, two weeks after graduation in 2015, she moved to Los Angeles. By Labor Day, she had landed a full-time job with Nickelodeon. Working in publicity, she got to see everything that goes into producing a TV show — from table reads and behind-the-scenes work to watching the actors on set.
“It’s so cool to see all the elements come together, and I knew I was in the right place,” she says. “It was just something new every day. That’s what led me to loving it. And I still love it.”
Since then, she has worked as a talent assistant to celebrity publicists, as a publicist for the E! Networks and as publicity manager for Hulu. When she had the chance to move to London to work for Disney, she jumped at the opportunity.
“It’s crazy to think I’ve been here almost four years,” she says. “It has flown by, and I’m getting to have some amazing experiences and build relationships that will continue to sustain my career, which is really exciting. And I love working for Disney.”
