The Producers Behind Ken Burns Award-Winning PBS Documentaries

Speaker: Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt 

Location:  Gannon University Waldron Campus Center - 628 Peach St, Erie, PA 16501 

Date/Time: Tuesday, November 10th 7:00-8:30pm

Admission: Early Bird Pricing - General Admission $25.75 / Preferred Seating $51.50

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Sarah Botstein 

Sarah Botstein has worked with Ken Burns for nearly 30 years and produced some of his most popular and acclaimed documentaries on PBS. Most recently, she produced and co directed The American Revolution. Her previous work includes The U.S. and the Holocaust, Hemingway, College Behind Bars, The Vietnam War, Prohibition, The War, and Jazz. Botstein also works closely with PBS LearningMedia to develop educational materials as part of the Ken Burns Classroom, and she was an original contributor to Ken Burns's UNUM. Botstein is now working on a three-part series about Lyndon B. Johnson and the Great Society.

David Schmidt 

David Schmidt is the producer and co-director, along with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein, of The American Revolution, a six-part, 12-hour series, which premiered on PBS in the fall of 2025. Schmidt began working with Florentine Films as a researcher and apprentice editor for The Roosevelts (2014), while also supervising the documentary's seven-episode script. His research on The Vietnam War (2017) won him the Jane Mercer Footage Researcher of the Year award, and he also worked closely on that project with writer Geoffrey C. Ward and helped coordinate postproduction. With Burns, Schmidt also produced the two-part biography Benjamin Franklin (2022) for PBS.

A graduate of Dartmouth College with a degree in History, Schmidt grew up on the Virginia Peninsula within the Historic Triangle of Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown—each site only minutes from his childhood home. He spent his summers working in the living history museum in Colonial Williamsburg and on the archaeological dig at Historic Jamestown. Those childhood experiences led him to pursue a career telling American history.