Thomas Lennon

Who is Thomas Lennon?

Thomas F. Lennon is a documentary filmmaker.

Thomas F. Lennon has alternated between historical and contemporary subject matter. His work, broadcast on PBS and HBO, has been nominated three times for an Academy Award, winning once, and has received major television awards including two George Foster Peabody Awards, two national Emmys and two DuPont-Columbia Journalism awards. He co-directed the HBO film Unchained Memories, along with Ed Bell, based on readings from the WPA slave narratives. For years, his work focused on ethnicity and race; recently he has focused on health, mounting, with filmmaker Ruby Yang, a vast multi-year AIDS prevention campaign seen over 900 million times on Chinese television. He and Ruby Yang made a trilogy of short documentary films about modern China, including The Blood of Yingzhou District, which won an Oscar in 2007, and The Warriors of Qiugang, nominated in 2011. This most recent film profiles an Anhui Province farmer's multi-year campaign to halt the poisoning of his village water by a nearby factory.