Latest in Ken Burns

EXCLUSIVE: Emmy-winning filmmaker Erika Dilday is joining Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon as co-director and co-producer of the upcoming documentary film Emancipation to Exodus (working title). It's a long-term commitment – the film about a critical period in the African American experience…

Ken Burns will dive into the history of the American buffalo as part of a new two-part, four-hour film set to air on PBS from October 16 to 17. The American Buffalo is the biography of the shaggy bovid which has been in production for four years. It will take viewers on a journey through more…

The Television Academy said Tuesday that it will honor Sean Penn with the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award and induct six new members into its Hall of Fame in November. The six Hall of Fame honorees are Debbie Allen, the six-time Emmy-winning director/choreographer; Ken Burns, the 16-time Emmy winner and…

EXCLUSIVE: Gradually, Then Suddenly: The Bankruptcy Of Detroit, directed by Sam Katz and James McGovern, swept the 2021 Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film, a three-year-old documentary award that carries a finishing grant of $200,000. The winning entry explores the decline of the American…

Muhammad Ali called himself the greatest, and filmmaker Ken Burns, director of the upcoming PBS documentary series about the boxing champion, "global icon and inspiration," is not one to disagree. "He comes to us, first and foremost, as the greatest athlete perhaps of all time, certainly of the 20th century, and as…

PBS on Tuesday introduced several new funding initiatives, revealed updated producing partner criteria and announced that it has hired an SVP Diversity Equity and Inclusion. The moves, revealed on the first day of the pubcaster’s TCA summer press tour slate, come as PBS faced questions at the last TCA tour in March…

Directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick are promising a "nuanced" portrait of Ernest Hemingway in their three-part, six-hour documentary on the Nobel Prize-winning author coming to PBS in April. Speaking at the PBS Winter Press Tour session Tuesday, Burns said the film deconstructs Hemingway's image as a "hyper-masculine"…

Documentary Hold Your Fire directed by Stefan Forbes (Boogie Man, The Lee Atwater Story) has nabbed the second annual Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film, a $200,000 finishing grant for a filmmaker who uses original research and compelling narrative to tell stories that touch on an aspect of American…

PBS Distribution will launch PBS Documentaries, a subscription channel on Amazon's Prime Video with 900 hours of content from Ken Burns' entire oeuvre to Nova, Frontline, American Masters, American Experience, Nature, Independent Lens and POV. The channel — which goes live August 4 for $3.99 a month with an Amazon…

HBO is developing Unruly, a six-part limited series about boxing legend Jack Johnson to be played by two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali. The project hails from Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman’s Playtone and will be written by Dominique Morisseau based the PBS documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fal…

On CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time Tuesday night documentarian Ken Burns, who made his name in 1990 with The Civil War, told the show’s host that, in his informed opinion, Confederate monuments across the country “have to go.” This comes on the same day that President Donald Trump said he will issue an executive order…

For The Last Dance, the ESPN documentary series about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, director Jason Hehir interviewed more than a hundred people, including two former presidents—Clinton and Obama—and a noted international diplomat. That would be Dennis Rodman, former star rebounder and occasional envoy to North…