Immortal moment for Sonya

In the past two weeks, filmmaker Sonya Pemberton has rubbed shoulders with Morgan Freeman and brought home an Emmy and it's all thanks to her Perth upbringing.

The executive producer and director of Genepool Productions travelled to New York this month to attend the News and Documentary Emmy Awards where her documentary Immortal won the Outstanding Science and Technology Programming category.

Pemberton and her family moved to WA from Ireland when she was nine and she attended Applecross Senior High School before studying film and television at the Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University).

Despite throwing away her long-time dream of studying medicine for film, science is in her blood. Pemberton's father - who now lives on a property between Pemberton and Manjimup - was a doctor at Princess Margaret Hospital and her grandfather a medical scientist.

She then spent a year at Channel Seven learning to edit and the nuts and bolts of television and now lives in Melbourne with her husband and cinematographer Harry Panagiotidis.

"I find it really humbling to think of the journey over nearly 20 years from Western Australian Young Filmmaker of the year to winning an Emmy in New York City in front of the 1000 top television makers in the world," she tells The West Australian.

Broadcast on SBS in 2010 as part of its Secrets of the Human Body season, Immortal was retitled Decoding Immortality for the American audience and broadcast on the Smithsonian Channel last year.

Immortal has now won more than 20 major accolades and won Pemberton the 2011 National Press Club Health Journalist of the Year.

Pemberton - who wrote and directed the 90- minute doco - started to follow Immortal's subject Professor Elizabeth Blackburn's work seven years ago.

"I tried to contact Liz and she didn't want to have anything to do with the media," Pemberton says. "She didn't want to make a film and so for two years I plagued her."

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Immortal moment for Sonya