Lynn Novick is one of the most renowned and respected documentary filmmakers and story tellers in America. For more than 30 years she has been directing and producing landmark documentary films for PBS about American life and culture, history, politics, sports, art, architecture, literature, and music. In collaboration with Ken Burns, she has created more than 80 hours of acclaimed programming including The Vietnam War, Baseball, Jazz, Frank Lloyd Wright, The War, and Prohibition. Novick has received Emmy, Peabody and Alfred I. duPont Columbia Awards.
Lynn's most recent production — her first as solo director — is College Behind Bars, which premiered at the New York Film Festival and aired on PBS in 2019. Produced by Sarah Botstein, the series explores urgently contemporary and timeless questions – What is prison for? Who in America has access to educational opportunity? Six years in the making, the series immerses viewers in the inspiring and transformational journey of a small group of incarcerated men and women serving time for serious crimes, as they try to earn college degrees in one of the most rigorous prison education programs in America – the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI). As the series unfolds, the incarcerated students master the liberal arts, reimagine themselves, come to terms with their pasts, become fully engaged citizens, and shatter stereotypes about incarcerated people and their intellectual and moral capacities. "What college does, it helps us learn about the nation," says BPI student Rodney Spivey-Jones. "It helps us become civic beings. It helps us understand that we have an interest in our community, that our community is a part of us and we are a part of it." "What you see in … these heartbreaking, inspiring stories, " says Jamil Smith in Rolling Stone, " is a testament to the power of education, and why it remains such a dangerous and underrated weapon against a racially and economically unjust status quo in this nation." Similarly, the Washington Post noted that those who oppose prison education programs are "perhaps aggravated at the sight of these men overachieving and the personal freedom that knowledge bestows." The Education Writers of America honored the series for Best Visual Storytelling: "The commitment and effort the filmmakers took to tell the stories of [men and women] trying to better their lives by obtaining a college degree – and what their stories say about our criminal justice system – is nothing short of incredible….The film does honor to its subjects and the debate over the purpose of education and rehabilitation."
Novick is collaborating with Burns, Botstein and writer Geoffrey C. Ward on several upcoming Florentine Films productions: a three part biography of Ernest Hemingway, a three part examination of America's response to the Holocaust, and a series on the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. Her next solo project is a major series on the history of crime and punishment in America. Potential future projects include a series on the history of Soviet spying in America, and a series about the public and private lives of remarkable American women. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Yale with honors in American Studies, and lives in New York City.
