Ken Burns.

Ken Burns was born on July 29, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York, to Lynn Smith Burns and Robert Kyle Burns, a cultural anthropologist. His family later moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he attended Pioneer High School. He graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, an experience that shaped his interdisciplinary approach to filmmaking.

Burns earned an Oscar nomination for his 1981 documentary Brooklyn Bridge, a chronicle of the bridge’s construction. His 1990 series The Civil War was a breakthrough: an 11-hour series that won two Emmys and spawned a companion book that sold over 700,000 copies at $50 each. He later directed Baseball 1994, an 18-hour documentary examining American society through the sport, and The Statue of Liberty 1985, among others.

Burns has been married twice: to Amy Stechler from 1982 to 1993 and to Julie Deborah Brown since 2003. He has one daughter, Sarah Burns, who became a documentary filmmaker. His brother Ric Burns is also a producer and director.

Burns’s The Civil War became the first documentary to gross over $100 million and has become perennial fund-raising programming for PBS. The Library of Congress selected his film Brooklyn Bridge for the National Film Registry in 2023. That same year, he received the National Medal of the Arts for his documentary filmmaking. His documentaries draw large audiences and shape historical documentary filmmaking.