Ken Burns

American filmmaker Ken Burns is best known for his widely recognised documentaries: Baseball, Jazz, The Civil War, The Vietnam War and many more. He is celebrated for his style of using archival photos and footage and has won several Emmy Awards, as well as two Academy Award nominations for The Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge.

In 1976, Burns co-founded a production company called Florentine Films which his daughter Sarah is now an employee at. After having completed some short films documentaries whilst working as a cinematographer for the BBC, he went on to adapt the book The Great Bridge by David McCullough which described the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge in a documentary of the same name. The feature documentary earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary and ran on PBS in the United States. Soon after, he produced The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God and The Statue of Liberty; the latter of which was nominated for Best Documentary Feature.

Burns has built a long and successful career covering a wide range of subjects from political history (Thomas Jefferson, 1997) and environmentalism (The National Parks, 2009) to war ( a the 15 hour WW II 2 documentary The War) which have all acquired comparable success.
In 2017, a piece in The New Yorker claimed that Burns and his company Florentine Films have chosen topics for a number of documentaries to be released by 2030. He will continue to cover a diverse range of topics including Muhammed Ali, Barack Obama, Ernest Hemingway, The American criminal justice system and African-American history.