Participating Organizations

David Grubin is a director, writer, producer, and cinematographer who has produced over 100 films, ranging across history, art, poetry, and science, winning every award in the field of documentary television, including two Alfred I. Dupont awards, three George Foster Peabody prizes, five Writers Guild prizes, and ten Emmys.

His biographies for the PBS series American Experience - Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided; LBJ; Truman; TR: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt; and FDR - have set the standard for television biography. His five-part series - Healing and the Mind with Bill Moyers - has won many awards, and the companion book, for which he was executive editor, rose to number one on The New York Times Best Sellers list, remaining on the list for 32 weeks.

Grubin has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, and is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Hamilton College. A former chairman of the board of directors of The Film Forum, he is currently a member of the Society of American Historians, and serves on the board at Poets House. Grubin has taught documentary film producing in Columbia University's Graduate Film Program, and has lectured on filmmaking across the country. In 2025, he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Pacific University.

Grubin says about his work:

For me, documentary filmmaking is a process of discovery, an opportunity to wander along some unmarked shore with my mind open and my senses alert. Tolerance for the disquieting limbo of uncertainty in the midst of chaos is at the center of my creative process. Making documentaries requires comfort with disorder – being at ease with what seems like an infinite number of brute, meaningless facts and knowing that only the empathetic imagination can infuse them with meaning.