Kenneth Lauren Burns is an American filmmaker known for his documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle American history and culture. His work is often produced in association with WETA-TV and/or the National Endowment for the Humanities and distributed by PBS.
Seabiscuit was a champion thoroughbred racehorse in the United States who became the top money-winning racehorse up to the 1940s. He beat the 1937 Triple Crown winner, War Admiral, by four lengths in a two-horse special at Pimlico and was voted American Horse of the Year for 1938.
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking developed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, inspired by Dziga Vertov's theory about Kino-Pravda. It combines improvisation with use of the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects hidden behind reality. It is sometimes called observational cinema, if understood as pure direct cinema: mainly without a narrator's voice-over. There are subtle, yet important, differences between terms expressing similar concepts. Direct cinema is largely concerned with the recording of events in which the subject and audience become unaware of the camera's presence: operating within what Bill Nichols, an American historian and theoretician of documentary film, calls the "observational mode", a fly on the wall. Many therefore see a paradox in drawing attention away from the presence of the camera and simultaneously interfering in the reality it registers when attempting to discover a cinematic truth.
The Civil War is a 1990 American television documentary miniseries created by Ken Burns about the American Civil War. It was the first broadcast to air on PBS for five consecutive nights, from September 23 to 27, 1990.
Geoffrey Champion Ward is an American editor, author, historian and writer of scripts for American history documentaries for public television. He is the author or co-author of 19 books, including 10 companion books to the documentaries he has written. He is the winner of seven Emmy Awards.
Elizabeth Farnsworth is an American journalist and author of the memoir, A Train Through Time – A Life, Real and Imagined.
Rory O’Connor is a journalist, author, educator, and documentary filmmaker. He is co-founder and president of the Globalvision Corporation, and board chair of the Global Center, an affiliated non-profit foundation. His films and television programs have aired on PBS, BBC, NHK, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, and numerous other networks. He has been involved in the production of more than two dozen documentaries, and his broadcast, film and print work has been honored with a George Polk Award, a Writer's Guild Award for Outstanding Documentary, an Orwell Award and two Emmys. He has written several books and blogs for the Huffington Post, AlterNet, Al Jazeera and other news sources.
Thomas Furneaux Lennon is a documentary filmmaker. He was born in Washington D.C. and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1968.
Stephen Henderson Talbot is an American TV documentary producer, reporter, writer, and longtime contributor to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the series Frontline. His more than 40 documentaries include the Frontline films "The Best Campaign Money Can Buy", "Rush Limbaugh's America", "The Long March of Newt Gingrich", "Justice for Sale", and "News War: What's Happening to the News". Talbot has also written and produced PBS biographies of writers Dashiell Hammett, Beryl Markham, Ken Kesey, Carlos Fuentes, Maxine Hong Kingston and John Dos Passos. He was co-creator and executive producer of the PBS music specials, Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders".
Jesús Salvador Treviño is an American television director of Mexican descent.
Richard E. Robbins is an American filmmaker and documentary maker, who has produced and directed several documentaries for ABC and PBS. The most notable is Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which puts forward the perspective of American troops returning home from service in Iraq. In January 2008, Robbins received an Academy Award nomination for the film as well as two Emmy nominations, and nominations from the International Documentary Association and the Directors Guild of America. He is also a noted producer, having produced several series for Peter Jennings Reporting, including Peter Jennings Reporting: LAPD and Peter Jennings Reporting: Dark Horizon – India, Pakistan, and the Bomb. He was a producer for the ABC special The Century: America's Time."
Robert Stone is a British-American documentary filmmaker. His work has been screened at dozens of film festivals and televised around the world, notably seven of his films have appeared on PBS's American Experience series and four of his films have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. He is an Oscar nominee for Best Feature Documentary and a three-time Emmy nominee for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking.
The West, sometimes marketed as Ken Burns Presents: The West, is a 1996 television documentary miniseries about the American Old West. It was directed by Stephen Ives and featured Ken Burns as executive producer. It was first broadcast on PBS on eight consecutive nights from September 15 to 22, 1996.
Thomas Wagner is an Emmy Award-winning American writer, producer and composer working primarily in documentary films. He is known for his work on Finding Lucy, an American Masters PBS documentary about actress Lucille Ball. Wagner won a prime-time Emmy Award for writing and producing that film. His script for Finding Lucy was also nominated for Best Documentary Script by the Writers Guild of America. Wagner also co-produced another PBS American Masters documentary, Rod Serling: Submitted for your Approval, and his script for that film bio, co-written with John Goff, was again nominated for Best Documentary Script by the Writers Guild of America. The Serling documentary also won a Bronze Plaque at the Columbus Film Festival and a Cine Gold Eagle. Wagner also composed the music for the Academy Award-nominated film, Daughter of The Bride which aired on HBO.
Insignia Films is a documentary film company, with its headquarters in New York City. The film company was founded in 1988 by Stephen Ives, with producer Amanda Pollak joining in 2001. Insignia Films has earned a particular reputation as one of the country’s foremost producers of historical documentaries. From America’s conquest of the West to the controversial role of the press in wartime to the amazing career of the Depression-era thoroughbred Seabiscuit, the nation’s history has been repeatedly and vividly brought to life by Insignia’s innovative approach to filmmaking.
Soap Life is a 2012 documentary film produced by New York Production Services that chronicles the decline of daytime television dramas and the prospective future of the genre.
Marion "Muffie" Meyer is an American director, whose productions include documentaries, theatrical features, television series and children’s films. Films that she directed are the recipients of two Emmy Awards, CINE Golden Eagles, the Japan Prize, Christopher Awards, the Freddie Award, the Columbia-DuPont, and the Peabody Awards. Her work has been selected for festivals in Japan, Greece, London, Edinburgh, Cannes, Toronto, Chicago and New York, and she has been twice nominated by the Directors Guild of America.
The Great War is a 2017 American documentary film directed by Stephen Ives, Amanda Pollak and Rob Rapley. It is based on World War I (1914–18) and focuses especially on the United States' 20-month experience of deploying to the European theater.
Sandy McLeod is an independent filmmaker. She is a member of the Directors Guild of America and has been nominated for an Academy Award.
Aron Gaudet is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and author. He is best known for The Way We Get By (2009), Beneath the Harvest Sky (2013), and Queenpins (2021). He writes and directs with his wife and film partner, Gita Pullapilly, under their banner, "Team A + G, Inc."
