Among his productions are The West (1996), Reporting America at War (2003), Roads to Memphis (2010), and Grand Coulee Dam (2012), and the four-part series Constitution USA (2013) which aired on PBS in the summer of 2013.
"[4] In his eighteen years of work in public television, Ives has established himself as one of the nation's leading independent documentary directors.
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 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 Directors Guild of America for Outstanding Directorial Achievement.
[5] In 2018, Ives won the Writer's Guild Award for outstanding achievement in writing for The Great War, Part II.