POV

Recapping a weekend of creation.

As documentary filmmaking has evolved, so too has POV, the influential and award-winning series on PBS that for the past 25 years has been a creative

Twelve days before Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse (2024) was set to broadcast on April 15 across PBS stations nationwide as part of its strand American Masters, the filmmakers were told that a 90-second sequence—which shows the famous artist discussing an anti-Trump cartoon he created for the 2017 Women’s March newspaper—would be cut from the documentary.

American Documentary, the nonprofit organization behind POV, POV Shorts, and America ReFramed, announces the 12 Wyncote Fellows who will attend the PBS Annual Meeting (May 19–21, Atlanta, Georgia). A curated program introduces independent filmmakers to the PBS Annual Meeting, the eight annual Wyncote Fellowship is coordinated by AmDoc in collaboration between PBS indie partners. This year, nominations were from POV, Firelight Media, ITVS, Reel South, WORLD, and the five organizational members of the National Multicultural Alliance: Black Public Media, Center for Asian American Media, Latino Public Broadcasting, Pacific Islanders in Communications, and Vision Maker Media.

In December 2023, as part of the series Making a Production, Documentary profiled Meerkat Media, the New York-based cooperatively owned production company and media arts collective. As a radical experiment in shared authorship and ownership, Meerkat built a sustainable framework for making the kind of films they cared about, while still providing steady paychecks, health insurance, and medical leave to their members. Since the publication of their profile, the group has faced industry-wide challenges, including tightening budgets and shrinking opportunities. At the same time, they’ve experienced major creative high points. Over Zoom, Documentary caught up with Sterrenberg to talk about Meerkat’s recent creative highs, the challenges of balancing freelance work with collective production, and how Emergent City, which opens at DCTV tomorrow and will be broadcast on POV later this year, took shape within the group.

Today, American Documentary (AmDoc) announced that award-winning independent filmmaker PJ Raval, known for directing stories of queer and Filipino

POV, the longest-running showcase of independent documentaries on PBS, turns 35 this year. Its executive producer since May 2021, Erika Dilday, had

Strong Island is Yance Ford's cinematic nonfiction exploration of racial injustice in the Long Island suburbs, told through the murder of the

Justine Nagan is the new executive director of American Documentary, Inc. and executive producer of PBS's POV series. She comes to PBS from Kartemquin

Simon Kilmurry takes the helm this summer as IDA's new executive director, following 16 years at the venerable PBS series POV—the last nine years as