Filmmaker Ken Burn

Noted Documentarian Ken Burns, twice-nominated for the Academy Award and two-time Emmy Award winner will be the sixth person to accept the award, on March 6th of 2014. 

Burns is best-known for his landmark PBS series The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), and The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009).  His body of work also contains historical films such as The Shakers  (1984), The Congress  (1988), and Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (1991); the biographical films Thomas Hart Benton (1988), Frank Lloyd Wright (1998), and Mark Twain (2001); and upcoming projects Vietnam, The Roosevelts; and Jackie Robinson.

Burns' career began shortly after graduation from Hampshire College in 1975, when he and several fellow students of the late photographer Jerome Liebling and his wife Elaine Mayes formed Florentine Films, a filmmaking collective which exists to this day.  In the early days he worked as a cinematographer for the BBC, Italian Television, and other venues, and still operates a camera when he can.  After Academy Award nominations for the films The Brooklyn Bridge (1981) and The Stature of Liberty (1985) he went long-form, on Public Television, with the ground-breaking success of The Civil War, which as received over 40 major film and television awards including the Peabody Award, two Grammy Awards, and a People's Choice Award. 

Burns was born in Brooklyn and had a peripatetic childhood as the son of Academics.  He used his first camera, an 8mm he received for his 17th Birthday in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his father was teaching at the University of Michigan, to shoot a documentary about a local factory, and the die was cast.  Burns' signature style - distinctive voices speaking primary source material, extensive close-up and moving-camera images of period photographs, and the use of memorable musical motifs such as The Ashokan Farewell - have come to define a genre of documentary filmmaking just as the successful broadcast history of his work has come to re-define the  importance of the documentary film in the marketplace.

It is with great pleasure that the Board of Heart & Soul, along with the Forrest Church Award Committee, makes this announcement, and we look forward to seeing you on March 6th for the presentation, which will be followed by the annual benefit auction for The Heart & Soul Charitable Fund. 

Details to follow, but Save the Date!