Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ken Burns is known for producing and directing long-form documentary films and television series, mostly on aspects of United States history. His most widely seen works include The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The Vietnam War (2017), and Country Music (2019), all distributed by PBS.
The Ken Burns effect is a technique of slowly zooming toward a subject in a still photograph and panning across the frame to create motion. Burns used it so consistently across his documentaries that Apple named the equivalent feature in its iPhoto, iMovie, and Final Cut Pro X software after him. The technique was formally known in film production as the rostrum camera method long before Burns popularized it.
Ken Burns has received two Academy Award nominations, both for Best Documentary Feature. The first was for Brooklyn Bridge (1981) and the second was for The Statue of Liberty (1985).
Ken Burns lives in Walpole, New Hampshire, a small town he moved to in 1979. Florentine Films, the production company he co-founded in 1976 with Elaine Mayes and Roger Sherman, is also based there.
Burns's mother Lyla was diagnosed with breast cancer when he was three and died when he was eleven. His psychologist father-in-law Gerald Stechler later told him that his entire body of work was an attempt to make people long gone come back alive. Burns has said that all of his films are, in some sense, about her.
The Civil War (1990) earned more than 40 major film and television awards, including two Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards (one for Best Traditional Folk Album), a Peabody Award, a duPont-Columbia Award, a D.W. Griffith Award, the Producer of the Year Award from the Producers Guild of America, a People's Choice Award, and the $50,000 Lincoln Prize.