Ken Burns speaks at Ringling College's Town Hall. Photo by Robert Pope.

On January 12, acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns kicked off Ringling College of Art and Design’s Town Hall Speaker Series with a lecture at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall. Burns, one of the most lauded voices in documentary filmmaking, is known best for his works related to American history, including The Civil War, Baseball and Prohibition. His most recent television miniseries, The American Revolution, debuted on PBS in November 2025. Below is an excerpt from the full Q&A interview that will appear in the March 2026 issue of SRQ Magazine.

SRQ: In today's age of digital media, where screens are a constant presence in our lives, have you noticed a shift in who your audience is and how they consume your work?

Burns: We’ve held on and retained, I'm very happy to say, that sort of PBS audience, which is growing older, but we’ve also been able to add younger parents because of our children’s content. I buried the lead, however. The great news is that for the first time in the history of PBS, one of my programs, The American Revolution, broke into Nielsen’s top 10 streaming list. We know that people aren’t reading books anymore. Nobody is reading books, we are constantly distracted by the thing in our pocket. Because there is so much content out there to stream, however, we are self-curating or binge watching, as people like to call it.

When Civil War, Baseball, Jazz and the National Parks came out, everybody was always lamenting, “nobody’s going to watch this.” And of course, those programs had huge audiences. They didn’t say that when The Roosevelts came out in 2014, because by that time, everybody was already binge watching, which is self-curating. My kids will spend the weekend watching 20 episodes of something, which is way longer than any film I’ve ever made. There’s some bad news, which is the erosion of attention and the ability to not read books—which are the greatest mechanical invention—but then there is also the proliferation of all these digital possibilities that make it possible for people who you wouldn’t necessarily think to be in our traditional audience to watch, digest and respond to our work.

Ken Burns speaks at Ringling College's Town Hall. Photo by Robert Pope.

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