Kenneth Lauren Burns[1] (born July 29, 1953) is an American filmmaker, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs in documentary films. His widely known documentary series include The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009), Prohibition (2011), The Roosevelts (2014), The Vietnam War (2017), and Country Music (2019). He was also executive producer of both The West (1996, directed by Stephen Ives), and Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (2015, directed by Barak Goodman).[2]

Burns in 2018

Born: Kenneth Lauren Burns, July 29, 1953 (age 66)

Brooklyn, New York City, New York, U.S.

Alma mater

Hampshire College

Occupation: Filmmaker 

Burns was born on July 29, 1953,[1] in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Lyla Smith (née Tupper) Burns,[6] a biotechnician,[7] and Robert Kyle Burns, at the time a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Columbia University in Manhattan.[6] The documentary filmmaker Ric Burns is his younger broth

Burns' academic family moved frequently. Among places they called home were Saint-Véran, France; Newark, Delaware; and Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his father taught at the University of Michigan.[7] Burns' mother was found to have breast cancer when he was three, and she died when he was 11,[7] a circumstance that he said helped shape his career; he credited his father-in-law, a psychologist, with a significant insight: "He told me that my whole work was an attempt to make people long gone come back alive."[7] Well-read as a child, he absorbed the family encyclopedia, preferring history to fiction.

Upon receiving an 8 mm film movie camera for his 17th birthday, he shot a documentary about an Ann Arbor factory. He graduated from Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor in 1971.[10] Turning down reduced tuition at the University of Michigan, he attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where students are graded through narrative evaluations rather than letter grades and where students create self-directed academic concentrations instead of choosing a traditional major.[7] He worked in a record store to pay his tuition. Living on as little as $2,500 in two years in Walpole, New Hampshire,[11] Burns studied under photographers Jerome Liebling, Elaine Mayes, and others. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in film studies and design[12] in 1975.

In 1976, Burns, Elaine Mayes, and college classmate Roger Sherman founded a production company called Florentine Films in Walpole, New Hampshire. The company's name was borrowed from Mayes' hometown of Florence, Massachusetts. Another Hampshire College student, Buddy Squires, was invited to succeed Mayes as a founding member one year later.[13][14] The trio were later joined by a fourth member, Lawrence "Larry" Hott. Hott did not actually matriculate at Hampshire, but worked on films there. Hott had begun his career as an attorney, having attended nearby Western New England Law School.[13]

Each member works independently, but releases content under the shared name of Florentine Films.[15] As such, their individual "subsidiary" companies include Ken Burns Media, Sherman Pictures, and Hott Productions. Burns' oldest child, Sarah, is also currently an employee of the company.[16]

Burns speaks at the Library of Congress in 2019

Burns worked as a cinematographer for the BBC, Italian television, and others, and in 1977, having completed some documentary short films, he began work on adapting David McCullough's book The Great Bridge, about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.[12] Developing a signature style of documentary filmmaking in which he "adopted the technique of cutting rapidly from one still picture to another in a fluid, linear fashion [and] then pepped up the visuals with 'first hand' narration gleaned from contemporary writings and recited by top stage and screen actors",[17] Burns made the feature documentary Brooklyn Bridge (1981)[18], which was narrated by David McCullough, and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary and ran on PBS in the United States.

Following another documentary, The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984), Burns was Oscar-nominated again for The Statue of Liberty (1985). Burns frequently collaborates with author and historian Geoffrey C. Ward, notably on documentaries such as The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, and the 10 part TV series The Vietnam War (aired September 2017).

Burns has built a long, successful career directing and producing well-received television documentaries and documentary miniseries. His oeuvre covers diverse subjects including art (Thomas Hart Benton, 1988), mass media (Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, 1991), sports (Baseball, 1994, updated with 10th Inning, 2010), political history (Thomas Jefferson, 1997), music (Jazz, 2001), literature (Mark Twain, 2001), environmentalism (The National Parks, 2009), and war (the 15-hour World War II documentary The War, 2007; the 11-hour The Civil War, 1990, which All Media Guide says "many consider his 'chef d'oeuvre'").[17]

In 2007, Burns made an agreement with PBS to produce work for the network well into the next decade.[19] According to a 2017 piece in The New Yorker, Burns and his company, Florentine Films, have selected topics for documentaries slated for release by 2030. These topics include country music, the Mayo Clinic, Muhammad Ali, Ernest Hemingway, the American Revolution, Lyndon B. Johnson, Barack Obama, Winston Churchill, the American criminal justice system, and African-American history from the Civil War to the Great Migration.[20]