Search
Ken Burns
Documentary Filmmaker
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1953, Ken Burns is a Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker whose career spans over 30 years. His first film, "Brooklyn Bridge," was nominated for an Academy Award in 1981. He was the director, producer, co-writer, chief cinematographer, music director, and executive producer of the groundbreaking documentary "The Civil War," the highest-rated series in the history of American public television. His other major films include "Baseball," "The West," "Jazz," and "The War." His most recent film, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea," premiered on PBS in 2009.
Read Less
2 min
The most effective question he ever asked a subject from behind the camera wasn’t a question at all.
3 min
The digital revolution has made filmmaking technologies available to the masses. But the idea that it makes us all artists, says Ken Burns, is “bullshit.”
4 min
It’s a classic historian’s question, but Ken Burns rejects it, insisting that “human nature is the only given.”
5 min
According to Ken Burns, imposing a narrative on the past keeps humans from going crazy—and is an act of love. Critics who find that view tidy and sentimental are revealing […]
4 min
Does making a documentary deepen or exhaust Ken Burns’s appreciation of its subject? And does he ever start imagining his life as one of his own films?
7 min
Inspired by Twain’s own example, the “Mark Twain” documentarian seeks to explore quintessentially American issues of “race and space.”
6 min
Filmmaker Ken Burns describes how he hopes “The National Parks” will succeed both as a topical statement about conservation and a timeless human story.