The Art of Storytelling in a Time of Disinformation (online)

Professor Thomas Allen Harris, senior lecturer in African American Studies and Film & Media Studies, invites students interested in documentary filmmaking to participate in a conversation with Ken and Sarah Burns YC '04. They will also be joined by Florentine Films associate digital producer and Yale alumnus, Clark Burnett ‘19. All four participants are filmmakers who employ archival documentary materials to promote truth and social justice.

The conversation will begin with an overview of Sarah’s senior thesis at Yale, which she wrote about on the Central Park jogger case and ultimately adapted into a book (2011). She and Ken, along with David McMahon, also wrote, produced, and directed their 2012 documentary The Central Park Five. Ken will introduce his digital initiative, UNUM—a media platform that atomizes his vast library of work to place current events in their historical context and trace themes throughout history.

The conversation will feature multiple video clips, including an excerpt from Professor Harris’s film Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, and from The Central Park Five, which captures reactions to the case from the media, politicians, and the public. Part of a 2019 UNUM roundtable discussion will also be shown, featuring Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Antron McCray reacting to The Central Park Five years after being exonerated from the case.

Pre-register for this event. (Yale Net ID required.)

In the image (left): Clark Burnett, Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and Thomas Allen Harris.

Thomas Allen Harris

Raised in the Bronx and Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania, Thomas Allen Harris is the founder and President of Chimpanzee Productions, a company dedicated to producing unique audio-visual experiences that illuminate the search for identity, family, and spirituality. Chimpanzee’s innovative and award-winning films, videos and transmedia projects have received critical acclaim at International film festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Toronto, FESPACO, Outfest, Flaherty and Cape Town, exhibited at the MoMA Documentary Fortnight, the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, the Corcoran Gallery, the Gwangju Biennale and Melbourne Arts Festival; and broadcast on PBS, the Sundance Channel, ARTE, CBC, Swedish Broadcasting Network and New Zealand Television.  

A graduate of Harvard College and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Harris has received numerous awards including a NAACP Image Award and an African Oscar as well as Guggenheim, Rockefeller and United States Artist Fellowships. Harris is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.  

In 2009, Harris and his team launched the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion Roadshow (1world1family.me), a socially engaged art project that employs touring Roadshows and virtual gathering spaces, where individuals are invited to explore and share the rich and revealing narratives found within their family photo albums. This project was developed into a TV series, Family Pictures USA which nationally broadcast on PBS beginning in 2019.

Ken Burns

Ken Burns has been making documentary films for over forty years.  Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War; Baseball; Jazz; The War; The National Parks:  America’s Best Idea; The Roosevelts:  An Intimate History; Jackie Robinson; The Vietnam War; and Country Music.

A December 2002 poll conducted by Real Screen Magazine listed The Civil War as second only to Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North as the “most influential documentary of all time,” and named Ken Burns and Robert Flaherty as the “most influential documentary makers” of all time. In March 2009, David Zurawik of The Baltimore Sun said, “… Burns is not only the greatest documentarian of the day, but also the most influential filmmaker period. That includes feature filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.  I say that because Burns not only turned millions of persons onto history with his films, he showed us a new way of looking at our collective past and ourselves.” The late historian Stephen Ambrose said of his films, "More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source."  And Wynton Marsalis has called Ken “a master of timing, and of knowing the sweet spot of a story, of how to ask questions to get to the basic human feeling and to draw out the true spirit of a given subject.”  

Future film projects include Ernest Hemingway, Muhammad Ali, The Holocaust and the United States, Benjamin Franklin, Lyndon B. Johnson and the Great Society, The American Buffalo, Leonardo da Vinci, The American Revolution, and The History of Reconstruction, among others.

Ken’s films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including sixteen Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards and two Oscar nominations; and in September of 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Sarah Burns

Sarah Burns is the author of The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding (Knopf, 2011) and, along with David McMahon and Ken Burns, the producer, writer and director of the documentary The Central Park Five, about the five Black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly convicted in the infamous Central Park Jogger rape of 1989. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012, was named the Best Non-Fiction film of 2012 by the New York Film Critics Circle and won a 2013 Peabody Award.

She produced and directed, along with David McMahon and Ken Burns, the two- part, four-hour Jackie Robinson, a biography of the celebrated baseball player and civil rights icon, which she wrote with McMahon. The film aired on PBS in April 2016 and she and McMahon were nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Nonfiction Program and won a WGA award for Documentary Script.

Her most recent project, East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story – which she wrote, produced, and directed with David McMahon – aired on PBS in 2020. She is working on several upcoming documentary series, including films on the life of Muhammad Ali and Leonardo da Vinci.

Clark Burnett

Clark Burnett is a film director from New Jersey in both documentary and narrative film. He got his start by making use of his mother’s point-and-shoot camera and learning the craft online in the early days of YouTube. Clark graduated from Yale College in 2019 with a degree in sociology. As an undergrad, he co-created Now, In Color, a docu-series dedicated to expanding our understanding of Blackness in America. The series has been featured in outlets like The New York Times, Teen Vogue, HuffPost, and WNPR.

A 2018 Princess Grace Foundation Honorarium recipient, his work has been recognized by such places as The Yale Policy Lab and the New Haven Documentary Film Festival. His latest short, Athol Park, premiered at the National Film Festival for Talented Youth and took home an audience award. Not long after graduation, Clark started working full time as an associate digital producer for UNUM at Florentine Films. He is incredibly grateful to be part of such a thoughtful team that considers, every day, the best ways to use history to inform the most pressing conversations in public life.