Director Stephen Ives

In his eighteen years of work in public television, Stephen Ives has established himself as one of the nation's leading independent documentary directors. His landmark series The West was seen by more than 38 million people nationwide during its national PBS premiere in the fall of 1996. Caryn James of the New York Times wrote that The West was "fiercely and brilliantly rooted in fact," and The New York Daily News called the programs a "breathtakingly beautiful series of films. . . that make riveting TV."

Ives’ documentary film Lindbergh, a portrait of the reluctant American hero Charles A. Lindbergh, premiered the third season of American Experience series on PBS in 1990. The Los Angeles Times called the film "a powerful slice of history. . . an engrossing study of a complex figure."

In 1987, Ives began a decade-long collaboration with filmmaker Ken Burns, as a co-producer of a history of the United States Congress, and as a consulting producer on the groundbreaking series, The Civil War and Baseball.

After the premiere of The West, Ives turned his attention towards contemporary films, producing a profile of the innovative Cornerstone Theater Company, which aired on HBO in the fall of 1999, and Amato: a love affair with opera, a portrait of the world’s smallest opera company which aired nationally on PBS in 2001 and earned Ives a nomination from The Director’s Guild of America for Outstanding Directorial Achievement.

His profile of the 1930’s thoroughbred Seabiscuit, which aired on American Experience in April 2003, won a Primetime Emmy award, and his PBS series, Reporting America at War, about American war correspondents, was lauded by the Los Angeles Times as “television that matters…a visual document of power and clarity.”

Since Seasbiscuit, Ives has directed three films for American Experience – Las Vegas, New Orleans and Kit Carson – and he is currently directing a fourth, about the assassination of Martin Luther King and the manhunt for James Earl Ray, based on a forthcoming book by best-selling author Hampton Sides. The film is scheduled for broadcast in 2010.