Ken Burns

The latest Ken Burns documentary tells the story of the United States’ national mammal, The American Buffalo. We spoke to an environmental historian and ethnobotanist who is also an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis and featured in the film.

An ongoing exhibition at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie tells the story of how a unit of artists, engineers, and other soldiers deceived German troops using inflatable tanks, weaponry, phony radio calls, and other artistic effects.

“Muhammad Ali is the athlete equivalent of an artist," says the visual artist Rahmaan Statik, a South Side native and former Nation of Islam member who has painted a mural of Ali at 2847 S. Kedzie Avenue in Little Village. 

Three of the most famous world heavyweight champions—most famous athletes in general—have lived in and had some of their most formative experiences and bouts in Chicago, a city that has also always been a stepping stone for amateur boxers.

"Muhammad Ali lived here for some of the most important years of his career," says his biographer Jonathan Eig. "Chicago was really where he began to find a national stage and to realize that he could be special." Plus, he had his "racial awakening" here. 

Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon take on "the greatest of all time" in their upcoming four-part documentary, examining the three-time heavyweight champion who was also a lightning rod for controversy around activism, pacifism, religion, and race.

Havana, Paris, Spain: the soundtrack of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's new Hemingway documentary helps set the places and moods of the writer's life, via the creative music produced by Johnny Gandelsman of Brooklyn Rider and the Silk Road Ensemble.

Join a conversation between filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick along with Hemingway scholar Verna Kale and acclaimed author Tim O'Brien as they discuss Hemingway's childhood in Oak Park. 

Hemingway was born in Oak Park but left as soon as he could and began framing himself in opposition to what he considered the middle-class values of the suburb. A sojourn in Chicago helped introduce him to a literary world and sent him on his way to Paris.

The three-part, six-hour Hemingway from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick comes to WTTW and PBS in April, featuring the voices of Jeff Daniels and Meryl Streep among others, as well as authors Edna O'Brien, Mario Vargas Llosa, Tobias Wolff, and more.

Executive produced by Ken Burns, The Gene: An Intimate History is a new two-part documentary that traces the history of the study of genetics and examines the ethical implications of new technologies. Plus, learn more about genes in a creative animated digital series.

“Country music is a different way to look at who we are as people and what our shared history is," says Dayton Duncan, the writer and producer of Ken Burns's upcoming eight-part Country Music documentary series. "It is uniquely American in its origin."

Chicago is well-known for music: electric blues, gospel, jazz, house. For a couple decades, it was also home to one of the United States' most popular country music radio shows, a program that launched the careers of stars and may have inspired the Grand Ole Opry.

He has already explored the history of jazz, and now Ken Burns turns his lens towards America's other great homegrown music in an eight-part, sixteen-hour documentary series coming this fall that explores country's history and people in Burns's trademark exhaustive manner.

Geoffrey C. Ward has written scripts for Ken Burns for the past thirty years, and his incredible life uniquely fits him for the job. He survived polio, hunted tigers in India as a teenager, and has an ancestor who bankrupted Ulysses S. Grant.