Kenneth Lauren Burns is an American director who is known for making documentaries and TV shows about American culture and history. His work is often made with help from WETA-TV and/or the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it is shown on PBS.
Along with The War (2007), The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009), Prohibition (2011), The Roosevelts (2014), The Vietnam War (2017), and Country Music (2019), he has made many well-known documentary shows. Along with other awards, Burns’ films have been nominated for two Academy Awards (for Brooklyn Bridge in 1981 and The Statue of Liberty in 1985). They have also won several Emmy Awards.
Ken Burns’s Early Life
Lyla Smith (née Tupper) Burns, a biotechnician, and Robert Kyle Burns Jr., a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Columbia University in Manhattan, welcomed their son on July 29, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York. His younger sibling is the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns.
Burns’s academic family relocated frequently. They resided in Saint-Véran, France; Newark, Delaware; and Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his father was a professor at the University of Michigan.
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Burns’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of three and passed away at the age of 11. He attributed this event to its influence on his career. He also attributed a significant insight to his psychologist father-in-law, Gerald Stechler: “He informed me that my entire endeavor was an attempt to resurrect individuals who had passed away.” He was well-read as a youth and absorbed the family encyclopedia, favoring history over fiction.
Personal Life of Ken Burns
Burns and Amy Stechler got married in 1982. The couple has two daughters: Sarah and Lilly. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1993. As of 2017, Burns lived in Walpole, New Hampshire.
On October 18, 2003, he married Julie Deborah Brown, the daughter of Leslie Mundjer and Richard Brown, senior vice president of Smith Barney, and stepdaughter of Ellen Brown. Julie Deborah Brown started Room to Grow, a non-profit that helps disadvantaged babies. They’ve got two daughters.
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Burns descended from Johannes de Peyster Sr. through Gerardus Clarkson, a Philadelphia-based American Revolutionary War surgeon, and is a distant relative of Scottish poet Robert Burns.
Burns participated in Henry Louis Gates’ Finding Your Roots in 2014 when he discovered that he is a descendant of a slave owner from the Deep South, as well as a pedigree dating back to Colonial Americans of Loyalist allegiance during the American Revolution.
Burns is an ardent quilt collector. From January 19 to May 13, 2018, approximately one-third of his personal quilt collection was on display at the International Quilt Study Center & Museum at the University of Nebraska. When asked if he would ever make a film about his mother, Lyla, Burns replied, “All of my films are about her.” I don’t think I could do it directly since the agony is so terrible.”
