Ken Burns Partnership

For more than 35 years, WETA has proudly partnered with Ken Burns to bring landmark documentaries to the nation via public television.

This collaboration has produced many films including The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, THE WAR, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, The Dust Bowl, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, The Vietnam War and Country Music. WETA is delighted to play an important role in bringing these films to a viewing audience nationwide.

Ken Burns and his colleagues at Florentine Films are an astonishingly creative and successful team, and it is WETA's great pleasure to work with them.

Ken Burns on Why Working With WETA Fits His Films

30s

Each of Ken Burns's films attempts to answer questions about the American experience, so it is not a mistake that he found his production partner, WETA, in the nation's capital, where so much of our national history is stored in repositories like the Library of Congress and the National Archives.

Ken Burns and WETA

1m 30s

For 30 years, WETA has partnered with Ken Burns to co-produce and bring his remarkable documentaries to audiences nationwide. For information on how to support Ken Burns productions please contact Danielle Manning-Halsey, Senior Director, Principal and Major Gifts. dmanninghalsey@weta.org or 703-998-2812.

Ken Burns Discusses His History Working with WETA

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Ken Burns recounts the origins of his working relationship with WETA, which began decades ago when he met former WETA CEO Ward Chamberlain.

Upcoming Productions

WETA collaborations with Ken Burns and Florentine Films continue with the following films currently in production.

The U.S. and the Holocaust (September 2022)
The story of how the American people grappled with one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the twentieth century, and how this struggle tested the ideals of U.S. democracy.
The American Buffalo (Fall 2023, tentative)
A biography of the continent’s most magnificent species, an improbable, shaggy beast that has found itself at the center of many of America's most thrilling, mythic, and sometimes heartbreaking tales.
Leonardo da Vinci (2024)
The story of Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, a fifteenth century Italian polymath of soaring imagination and profound intellect who left behind artistic works of staggering beauty and detailed sketches of futuristic contraptions of warfare and flight that today are marveled for their technical ingenuity and foresight.
The American Revolution (2025)
A series on America’s founding struggle — a conflict that was both a war for independence, a civil war, and a world war, fought by neighbors on American farms and between global powers an ocean or more away.