Independent documentary filmmaker and alumna Sarah Colt ’88 spoke with students as this year’s Henry R. Heyburn ’39 Lecturer. Sarah shared her process of developing documentaries of historical subjects, specifically the work involved in creating her film Geronimo, one part of the PBS American Experience series on Native American history. Before starting her own company in 2008, Sarah produced the highly-acclaimed biography RFK and earned an Emmy Award for Outstanding Science, Nature, and Technology for co-producing The Secret Life of the Brain. Her credits include the Emmy-nominated biography of Walt Disney and a biography of Henry Ford, both for American Experience; and “A Nation Reborn” and “A New Light” for PBS’s Frontline and the American Experience series God in America. She is directing and producing a series about the Gilded Age, which will air on PBS in 2018. In 2004, Sarah was awarded an International Reporting Project Fellowship through Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Sarah attended Harvard University, where she began her documentary career as a still photographer and earned several prizes for her work, including a Radcliffe Traveling Fellowship that sent her to Zimbabwe for a year.
“I never thought history would be an integral part of my career. Now, as a filmmaker, I get to be a storyteller and put all these pieces of history together like a puzzle, re-creating it, documenting it, in interesting ways. Making these films has revealed to me that history is alive, and that sometimes the process is almost more important than the final product.”