Ken Burns

Kenneth Lauren Burns (born July 29, 1953) is an American filmmaker known for his documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle American history and culture. His work is often produced in association with WETA-TV and/or the National Endowment for the Humanities and distributed by PBS.

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), and '' Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies'' (2015). Burns's documentaries have earned two Academy Award nominations (for 1981's '' Brooklyn Bridge'' and 1985's ''The Statue of Liberty'') and have won several Emmy Awards, among other honors.

Early life and education

Burns was born on July 29, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York, to Lyla Smith (née Tupper) Burns, a biotechnician, and Robert Kyle Burns, Jr., at the time a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Columbia University in Manhattan. The documentary filmmaker Ric Burns is his younger brother.

Burns's 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. Burns describes his family as hippies.

Burns's mother was found to have breast cancer when he was three, and she died when he was 11, a circumstance that he said helped shape his career; he credited his psychologist father-in-law, Gerald Stechler, with a significant insight: "He told me that my whole work was an attempt to make people long gone come back alive." 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. 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.

Burns worked in a record store to pay his tuition. Living on as little as $2,500 in two years in Walpole, New Hampshire, Burns studied under photographers Jerome Liebling, Elaine Mayes, and others, describing Liebling as his "principal mentor." He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in film studies and design in 1975.

Florentine Films

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's hometown of Florence, Massachusetts. Another Hampshire College student, Buddy Squires, was invited to succeed Mayes as a founding member one year later. 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.

Each member works independently, but releases content under the shared name of Florentine Films. As such, their individual "subsidiary" companies include ''Ken Burns Media'', ''Sherman Pictures'', and ''Hott Productions''. Burns's oldest child, Sarah, is also an employee of the company as of 2020.

Burns and his team edits on Avid Technology software.

Career

Burns initially worked as a cinematographer for the BBC, Italian television, and others. In 1977, having completed some documentary short films, he began work on adapting David McCullough's book ''The Great