Latest in Higher Ground Productions

EXCLUSIVE: Heather McGhee's New York Times bestseller The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together is getting the audio series treatment. Higher Ground, the production company set up by President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, has struck an option deal to turn the non-fiction book into a…

Following the critical acclaim of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, George C. Wolfe and Netflix are reteaming as Wolfe has come on to direct Rustin for Netflix and President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions. Milk scribe Dustin Lance Black will pen the script. The story follows tells the story of…

President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama's production company Higher Ground Productions has set its latest slate of film and TV projects for Netflix. The streamer is developing two TV series and four feature films as part of the slate. On the TV side, Reverie and Extant creator Mickey Fisher is adapting Firekeeper’s D…

Can a summer camp change the world? If you're talking Camp Jened in upstate New York, a place that welcomed kids with disabilities for a generation, the answer is yes. "It was a utopia," camper Denise Sherer Jacobson recalls in Crip Camp, the Netflix documentary about Jened and how it helped spur the movement for…

President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama's production company Higher Ground Productions is getting into the kids' TV business with an animated preschool series from Doc McStuffins creator Chris Nee and Netflix. The streamer has ordered 40, 12-minute episodes of Ada Twist, Scientist, which is based on the book series…

If Michelle Obama wasn’t so adamant that she isn’t running for public office, the perfectly timed new Netflix documentary Becoming would sure seem like a campaign launch. Dropping on May 6 on the streamer, the recently announced very authorized biopic of sorts could also be Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s worst nightmare…

Joe and Anthony Russo’s AGBO production of Mohsin Hamid’s bestseller Exit West is coming together, Deadline has confirmed. The project, which now has Rogue One: A Star Wars Story‘s Riz Ahmed attached to star and executive produce, and Yann Demange directing, is also seeing Michelle and Barack Obama’s Higher Ground Prod…

The rustbelt rebound story American Factory won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature tonight, earning gold for the first collaboration between Netflix and Barack and Michelle Obama's production company Higher Ground, which produced with Participant Media. Directors Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert and producer Jeff…

Many emotional moments are expected at tonight’s opening of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival with Crip Camp, but few will top an elegant farewell offered by Robert Redford. With a declaration of “much love to you,” the festival founder praised outgoing festival director John Cooper onstage Thursday at a packed Eccles…

When American Factory was announced on Monday as one of the five Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature, among the first to congratulate filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert were Barack and Michelle Obama. "Glad to see American Factory's Oscar nod for Best Documentary," the former president tweeted. "It's…

It was a good Oscar nomination day for the Obamas as the documentary American Factory earned a was included on the list of nominees alongside The Cave, The Edge of Democracy, For Sama and Honeyland. The original Netflix docu was presented by the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions and Participant Media and takes a dive…

Higher Ground, the production company founded by President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle, has hired Ada Chiaghana as VP Development and Production. Chiaghana moves over from HBO, where she has been a creative executive in the original programming department, working on half-hour series including Los Espookys and S…