Dayton Duncan was the writer and co-producer of The National Parks: America's Best Idea documentary produced by Ken Burns, and has also been involved for many years with other series by Burns including The Civil War, Baseball and Jazz. For the 12-hour series The West about the history of the American West, broadcast in 1996, Duncan was the co-writer and consulting producer. It won the Erik Barnouw Award from the Organization of American Historians.
He is the writer and producer of Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, a four-hour documentary broadcast in November 1997. The film attained the second-highest ratings (following The Civil War) in the history of PBS and won a Western Heritage award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a CINE Golden Eagle, as well as many other honors. He is the co-writer and producer of Mark Twain, a four-hour film biography of the great American humorist which was broadcast on PBS in 2002. His next film with Burns was Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip, about the first transcontinental automobile trip, which he wrote and produced. It won the prestigious Christopher Award and a Telly Award.
Kenneth Lauren "Ken" Burns (born July 29, 1953) is an American director and producer of documentary films, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs. Among his productions are The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009) and Prohibition (2011).
Burns' documentaries have been nominated for two Academy Awards, and have won Emmy Awards, among other honors.
Ken Burns was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, according to his official website, though some sources give Ann Arbor, Michigan, and some, including The New York Times, give both Brooklyn and Ann Arbor. The son of Lyla Smith (née Tupper) Burns, a biotechnician, and Robert Kyle Burns, at the time a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Columbia University, in Manhattan. Ken Burns' brother is the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns.
Burns' academic family moved frequently, and lived in Saint-Véran, France; Newark, Delaware; and Ann Arbor, where his father taught at the University of Michigan. Burns' mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when Burns was 3, and died when he was 11, a circumstance that he said helped shape his career; he credited his father-in-law, a psychologist, with a signal insight: "He told me that my whole work was an attempt to make people long gone come back alive.". Well-read as a child, he absorbed the family encyclopedia, preferring history to fiction. Upon receiving an 8 mm film movie camera for his 17th birthday, he shot a documentary about an Ann Arbor factory. Turning down reduced tuition at the University of Michigan, he attended the new Hampshire College, an alternative school in Amherst, Massachusetts with narrative evaluations rather than letter grades and self-directed academic concentrations instead of traditional majors. He worked in a record store to pay his tuition.
Kate Armstrong is a Canadian artist, writer and curator with a history of projects focusing on experimental literary practices, networks and public space.
Armstrong was born in Calgary, Alberta and attended university at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, at the University of Montpellier, France, The University of Glasgow, Scotland, and at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland. She has also lived in Tokyo and New York. She resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Armstrong's network art projects include PING (2003), Grafik Dynamo (2005), Why Some Dolls Are Bad (2007), and Path (2008).
Armstrong publishes on issues in contemporary art and has a book, Crisis and Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture (Michigan State University Press, 2002).
She founded Upgrade Vancouver in 2003 and has produced over 100 events in the field of art and technology in Vancouver, as well as many international events and exhibitions in connection with Upgrade International, a network operating in 30 cities worldwide. Upgrade Vancouver was the first node in Upgrade International outside New York City.
Corinne Hofmann is a Swiss author most famous for her multi-million selling memoir Die weisse Massai (The White Masai).
Born on June 4, 1960 to a German father and a French mother, Corinne studied in the canton of Glarus and eventually went into the retail trade. At the age of twenty-one, she opened her own clothing store.
In 1986, Hofmann and her boyfriend Marco made a trip to Kenya. There, she met a Samburu warrior named Lketinga Leparmorijo and instantly found him irresistible. She left Marco, went back to Switzerland to sell her possessions, and, in 1987, returned to Kenya, determined to find Lketinga, which she eventually did. The couple moved in together, married, and had a daughter. The Samburu are a pastoralist people related to the Maasai, and live in small villages in an arid area of central Kenya. Hofmann moved into her mother-in-law's manyatta (compound) and learned to live as a Samburu woman, fetching wood and water. She opened a small shop in the village, to sell basic goods.