[7] Burns's mother was found to have breast cancer when he was three, and she died when he was 11,[4] a circumstance that he said helped shape his career; he credited his psychologist father-in-law, Gerald Stechler,[8] with a significant insight: "He told me that my whole work was an attempt to make people long gone come back alive.

Upon receiving an 8 mm film movie camera for his 17th birthday, he shot a documentary about an Ann Arbor factory.

Living on as little as $2,500 in two years in Walpole, New Hampshire,[10] Burns studied under photographers Jerome Liebling, Elaine Mayes, and others.

In 1976, Burns, Elaine Mayes, and college classmate Roger Sherman founded a production company called Florentine Films in Walpole, New Hampshire.

Another Hampshire College student, Buddy Squires, was invited to succeed Mayes as a founding member one year later.

[14] As such, their individual "subsidiary" companies include Ken Burns Media, Sherman Pictures, and Hott Productions.

[11] Developing a signature style of documentary filmmaking in which he "adopted the technique of cutting rapidly from one still picture to another in a fluid, linear fashion [and] then pepped up the visuals with 'first hand' narration gleaned from contemporary writings and recited by top stage and screen actors",[16] Burns made the feature documentary Brooklyn Bridge (1981),[17] which was narrated by David McCullough, earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary and ran on PBS in the United States.

Following another documentary, The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984), Burns was Oscar-nominated again for The Statue of Liberty (1985).

[18] According to a 2017 piece in The New Yorker, Burns and his company, Florentine Films, have selected topics for documentaries slated for release by 2030.

These topics include country music, the Mayo Clinic, Muhammad Ali, Ernest Hemingway, the American Revolution, Lyndon B. Johnson, Barack Obama, Winston Churchill, the American criminal justice system, and African-American history from the Civil War to the Great Migration.

Julie Deborah Brown founded Room to Grow, a non-profit providing aid to babies in poor families.

[28] In 2008, the Democratic National Committee chose Burns to produce the introductory video for Senator Ted Kennedy's August 2008 speech to the Democratic National Convention, a video described by Politico as a "Burns-crafted tribute casting him [Kennedy] as the modern Ulysses bringing his party home to port.

The award recognizes an individual or organization that has effectively communicated the values of the National Park System to the American public.

[46] As of 2010[update], there is a Ken Burns Wing at the Jerome Liebling Center for Film, Photography and Video at Hampshire College.

[49] The medal, awarded biennially and accompanied by a cash prize of $25,000, is given to honor a person whose humanistic endeavors in scholarship, journalism, literature, or the arts have made a difference in the world.

[51] In May 2015, Burns gave the commencement address at Washington University in St. Louis and received an honorary doctorate of humanities.

For example, The Civil War features a distinctive violin melody throughout, "Ashokan Farewell", which was performed for the film by its composer, fiddler Jay Ungar.

Burns stated in a 2009 interview that he initially declined to have his name associated with the software because of his stance to refuse commercial endorsements.

[59] As a museum retrospective noted, "His PBS specials [are] strikingly out of step with the visual pyrotechnics and frenetic pacing of most reality-based TV programming, relying instead on techniques that are literally decades old, although Burns reintegrates these constituent elements into a wholly new and highly complex textual arrangement.