Director and Writer—Ross Spears

Ross Spears has been the Producer/Director/Writer for seven award-winning feature documentaries on subjects relevant to American culture and American history. Ross Spears is one of only two filmmakers in America to have had both a series (Tell About the South: Voices in Black and White) and an individual feature (To Render a Life) to be nominated Best Documentary of the Year by the International Documentary Association (IDA).  All of Ross Spears’s films have been shown on PBS and have been judged among the best ever made in their subject areas.

Indeed, as a lifelong native of Appalachia, as well as a filmmaker who has devoted much of his creative energy to telling stories related to Appalachia, Project Director Ross Spears brings a wealth of personal knowledge and experience to the project. As a member of the Advisory Board to the upcoming Encyclopedia of Appalachia, Spears has been surrounded by scholars of all persuasions—from geologists and botanists to historians and ethnomusicologists—all of whom are centering their attention on the region called Appalachia.

His most recent project is Tell About the South: Voices in Black and White, a three-part series on the history of Modern Southern Literature.  Lewis Simpson, Editor of The Southern Review called Tell About the South “A great film about a remarkable group of storytellers told by another remarkable storyteller. A landmark documentary.” Tell About the South was picked as an Editors Choice by Booklist magazine, and features the greatest writers of the South, past and present, including interviews with most of the greatest living Southern writers.

Ross Spears’s other films include AGEE (1980)—the only film biography of an American writer ever to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. AGEE also won a Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival. The Electric Valley (1983), a history of the TVA, was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Documentary. Long Shadows (1986) was selected to be part of the Southern Circuit Filmmakers Tour in 1990. To Render a Life, a feature documentary film based on the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. Film critic Andrew Sarris has called To Render a Life “One of the best films of 1992.” The International Documentary Association nominated To Render a Life as Best Documentary of the Year in 1993. It also won a Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival.

Producer and Writer—Jamie Ross

Jamie Ross has worked with the James Agee Film Project for over twenty-five years as a writer, editor and producer.  She was Associate Producer and Writer for Long Shadows: the Legacy of the American Civil War and was a researcher and writer for the series on Southern literture, Tell About the South: Voices in Black and White. She is a freelance writer, research librarian, and consultant with a wide range of expertise from oral history to film production.  Jamie Ross has extensive experience in educational outreach and is the author of several study guides.

Her work on the film series APPALACHIA began years before any camera work was begun. She spent the the first two years of the project exploring archives and traveling through the mountains gathering information for a new series which would bring the rich and grand story of the Appalachian region to the public. The more she researched, the more she realized that the only way to weave the many threads of the Appalachian story together would be to make the mountains the main character. Ross Spears agreed, and they began what was to become the first environmental history series of any region ever on film APPALACHIA: A History of Mountains and People.

Jamie Ross has a long and intimate history in the mountains. Her roots in the region go back thousands of years through her Catawba and Miami ancestors. She has hiked hundreds of miles along its peaks, worked for eight years in one of its rural school systems, taught in its community colleges and biked thousands of miles of its backroads. She has brought this passion for the region as well as her many years experience as a researcher and filmmaker to the making of APPALACHIA and the result is as one viewer put it: “pure poetry.”

Consulting Producer—Paul Wagner

Paul Wagner is an internationally recognized Writer/Producer/Director. He won an Academy Award for Best Documentary for The Stone Carvers in 1984 and a National Emmy Award for A Paralyzing Fear: The Story of Polio in America in 1998.  A native of Appalachia and a graduate of the University of Kentucky, Paul Wagner’s other documentary feature productions include Out of Ireland: the Story of the Irish in America, and Miles of Smiles, as well as the dramatic feature Windhorse.

Paul Wagner joined the APPALACHIA production in spring, 2000. Paul Wagner has brought to the project his long experience as a documentary filmmaker and writer, as well as his personal background as a native of Eastern Kentucky. Now a resident of the Blue Ridge region of Virginia, Paul Wagner has often chosen Appalachian subject matter for his films.  In A Congress of Wonders he dramatized the work of Kentucky writer, Ed McClanahan.  In East of the Blue Ridge he explored the literary and sports culture of his Blue Ridge Mountain area of Virginia. In Out of Ireland Paul Wagner created a feature length portrayal of Irish immigration to America, including sections of Appalachia.