The awards ceremony will take place on September 13, but minor awards are announced before.
Another president had already received an Emmy — Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956 — but in his case it was an honorary award.
After leaving office in 2017, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle each wrote bestselling memoirs and, in addition to their nonprofit foundation, started a production company that signed a contract with Netflix worth estimated at tens of millions of dollars.
Their company’s first documentary, “American Factory,” won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and an Emmy for Directing, but the awards went to the filmmakers, not the Obamas themselves.
Barack Obama’s successor to the presidency, Donald Trump, didn’t win an Emmy for his reality show “The Apprentice,” despite being nominated twice.
Other nominees in the narrator category include former NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (“Black Patriots: Heroes Of The Civil War”), Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o (“Serengeti II”) and naturalist veteran David Attenborough (“The Mating Game”).
The former American president (2009-2017) has also already won two Grammy Awards, for the audio versions of his memoirs, “The Audacity of Hope” and “Dreams from My Father”.
Among his distinctions, Mr. Obama had also received the Nobel Peace Prize after his victory in the 2008 presidential election, for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”.