Ken Burns

Ken Burns (born 1953) is an American documentary filmmaker whose multi-part historical series for the Public Broadcasting Service have shaped popular understanding of the United States since the 1980s. His trademark technique of slow camera moves across still photographs, paired with first-person archival voices, has been widely imitated and is named the Ken Burns effect in editing software.

Kenneth Lauren Burns was born on 29 July 1953 in Brooklyn, New York. His father Robert Kyle Burns was a cultural anthropologist and his mother Lyla Smith Burns a biotechnician. The family followed Robert's academic posts to Saint-Véran in France, Newark in Delaware, and finally to Ann Arbor, where Lyla died of cancer when Ken was eleven.

He studied at Hampshire College in Massachusetts under the still photographer Jerome Liebling and the filmmaker Elaine Mayes, graduating in 1975. With classmates he founded Florentine Films, settled in Walpole, New Hampshire, and released his first documentary Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, which earned an Academy Award nomination.

His eleven-hour series The Civil War drew forty million viewers when PBS broadcast it in 1990. He followed it with Baseball, Jazz, The War, The National Parks, Prohibition, The Roosevelts, The Vietnam War, Country Music, Hemingway, Benjamin Franklin, The U.S. and the Holocaust, and The American Buffalo, with The American Revolution scheduled for 2025.

His name Ken derives from a short form of Kenneth, from the Scottish Gaelic Coinneach meaning "handsome" or "comely." Ken is a masculine name used as a given name in its own right in English-speaking countries since the early twentieth century.