In conversation with Tracey Matisak

“Not only the greatest documentarian of the day, but also the most influential filmmaker period” (The Baltimore Sun), Ken Burns has opened the doors of American history for millions of people. With an intimately personal yet grand style of storytelling, his films have resurrected the people and events both mythologized and lost to history. His documentaries include Baseball, Jazz, The Dustbowl, Brooklyn Bridge, and the landmark series The Civil War. His films have won 12 Emmy Awards and have twice been nominated for Oscars. A seven-part program that follows Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt for more than a century, Burns’s new series airs on PBS this fall.

Geoffrey C. Ward, Burns’ longtime collaborator, is the principal writer of The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, and 13 other of the director’s PBS documentaries. For his work he has won seven Emmy Awards.  Ward is also author of A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, winner of the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, as well as more than a dozen other books whose themes range from East Indian culture to Mark Twain.

Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture