“My deeply academic Swarthmore education has had, and continues to have, very practical applications in my career in the entertainment industry. What I studied is how media affects an audience, how it makes you feel, what it makes you think, and what certain representations are saying about the world,” says Bernstein.

“Even in something as seemingly ‘surface’ as reality TV, it is that high-brow background that allows us to push the culture a little bit forward, to be a little subversive and inject some kind of social agenda or expose certain stereotypes even while we are within them.”

One of Bernstein’s personal favorite projects as an executive producer was a Bravo television series, In a Man’s World, framed as a social experiment where women donned elaborate prosthetics and went undercover as men to reveal real-world biases.

Another for which she served as an executive producer, MTV’s Made, followed high school students as they pursued a goal they’d set for themselves. “Underneath the ‘I want to be a cheerleader, ‘I want to be a rock star,’ ‘I want to be a football player,’ ‘I want to lose weight,’ there was always an exploration of gender, sexuality, or race that came into it,” says Bernstein, who majored in film and cultural studies at Swarthmore.

Bernstein’s latest series, Mathis Family Matters, premiers on the E! network on Juneteenth. The docu-soap follows the life, love, and laughter of Judge Mathis, the longest running African American male host of a daytime TV show, his wife and their four adult children, all living in the same city for the first time.

A New Yorker and Brooklynite originally from Russia, Bernstein came to the U.S. as a political refugee at age 2. She earned an M.A. from New York University in cinema studies, and from there climbed the ranks of production jobs until she became executive producer of a television show. “I knew I wanted to be a storyteller and I knew I wanted to tell stories in a visual medium,” she says. “I was obsessed with film and television and storytelling.”

Bernstein also works as a screenwriter, and recently completed a movie adaptation of Arthur Miller’s first play for the acclaimed theater director Scott Ellis.

She confronted the same kinds of issues and questions working on the Miller adaptation that she runs into working on reality TV shows. “We ask what the character wants, what is their obstacle, and why do we care? We want to know how are we going to make it pay off at the end and what have they learned? All of the questions I ask about the characters of one of the greatest playwrights in history are the same questions I ask about characters on my reality shows. It doesn’t matter what kind of story it is. The story needs to have an impact.”