About Paul Wagner
Paul Wagner is an Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning independent filmmaker who has produced and directed over fifty films over a fifty-year career.
His most recent documentaries are Bodies Upon the Gears, a short film about Mario Savio and the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement sponsored by FIRE - the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expresion, and Georgia O'Keeffe: the Brightness of Light, a feaure documentary about the life and art of the iconic artist, now showing in theaters across the country.
Many of Paul's documentaries have been broadcast nationally on PBS. They include The Stone Carvers, winner of the Academy Award for Best Short Documentary and the national Emmy Award for Best Director, about the Italian American artisans who carved the statues and gargoyles of Washington National Cathedral; Miles of Smiles/Years of Struggle, a Telluride Film Festival premiere and winner of four regional Emmy Awards, the story of the Pullman porters who formed America’s first black labor union; Signature: George C. Wolfe, a portrait of the controversial New York theatrical writer and director; Good Work: Masters of the Building Arts, produced in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution, about artisans from many different American regions and craft traditions; Black in Blue, about the African American University of Kentucky football players who broke the color line in the Southeastern Conference in the 1960s; and Out of Ireland, a sweeping history of Irish emigration to America that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
Paul’s dramatic feature Windhorse, about young Tibetans struggling for freedom under the Chinese communist regime, won awards for Best American Feature and for Best Director at the Santa Barbara Film Festival and was released theatrically by Shadow Distribution and New Yorker Films. Windhorse was filmed secretly inside China and Nepal and is recognized by American Cinematographer magazine as the world's first digitally-shot feature film.
Wagner’s films have won many honors including film festival screenings at Sundance, Telluride, Toronto, Rotterdam, Sydney, and Tokyo; numerous grants from the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities; two national Emmy Awards for Best Documentary Director and Best Film Research; and the Academy Award for Best Short Documentary. Paul has directed voiceovers with Liam Neeson, Ashley Judd, Gabriel Byrne, Hal Holbrook, Kelly McGillis, Aidan Quinn, Olympia Dukakis, John Grisham, Hugh Dancy and Claire Danes. In addition to his filmmaking, he taught courses in screenwriting and dramatic film directing at the University of Virginia 2017-2025 and aboard Semester-at-Sea in 2009 and 2015.
In the 1970s, before starting his career in film, Paul Wagner performed as a country music singer in Philadelphia.
Paul was born in Louisville, Kentucky and earned a BA in English and an MA in Communications at the University of Kentucky, with graduate studies at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. He resides in Charlottesville, Virginia with his wife, Ellen Casey Wagner. Paul and Ellen are the principal officers in American Focus, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to the creation of independent films about America and her people.
For a complete resume, follow this link here.