EXCLUSIVE: Higher Ground, the production company of President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, has appointed Anikah McLaren to serve as Head of Film, Deadline can exclusively reveal. McLaren joins from the recently shuttered Participant, where she spent a little over five years as Executive Vice…

Former President Barack Obama made mention of the end of Hollywood’s labor strife at a special screening on Friday of Rustin, the Netflix biopic of civil rights Bayard Rustin made by he and former First Lady Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Prioductions. Introducing the movie at the HBCU First Look…

EXCLUSIVE: Filmmaker George C. Wolfe was not interested in doing what he termed "icon crap" in his movie Rustin, about the multi-layered life of Bayard Rustin, regarded as one of the most influential organizers of the Civil Rights Movement and the architect of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom…

EXCLUSIVE: Netflix has released a trailer for the award-winning documentary Descendant, a day before the Margaret Brown film screens as part of the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival. The documentary, from Higher Ground – the production company of Barack and Michelle Obama – Participant, and Night Tide in…

EXCLUSIVE: BUCK, one of the animation studios behind the Obamas-produced We the People for Netflix, has signed a trio of staffers including former Cartoon Network Series Exec Mike Rauch. Rauch, who has worked on The Powerpuff Girls, Apple & Onion, and Victor and Valentino and is also the founder of Rauch Bros…

Former President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama have established quite a track record with their Netflix-based production company, Higher Ground. Their first documentary, American Factory, won the Academy Award in 2020, and last year their documentary Crip Camp earned an Oscar nomination. Higher Ground's latest…

The 44th President of the United States is going to front a five-part docuseries for Netflix next month. Taking his post-White House career to yet another level, Barack Obama will appear in and narrate the internationally spanning Our Great National Parks. Set to launch on the streamer on April 13 and spanning five…

Doc McStuffins creator Chris Nee has reunited with President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions for the Netflix animated series We the People. Nee’s 10-episode series, also executive produced by Kenya Barris through his Khalabo Ink Society banner, combines music and animation to educate a new…

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…