About Paul Wagner
Paul Wagner is an Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning independent filmmaker, whose documentaries have premiered at the Sundance, Toronto, Telluride and Rotterdam film festivals and have been broadcast widely on PBS. He has produced and directed over forty films over a forty-year career.
His documentaries include The Stone Carvers, about the Italian American artisans who carved the statues and gargoyles of Washington National Cathedral; Miles of Smiles/Years of Struggle, 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 and broadcast on PBS in 2018, Black in Blue, about the African American 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, featuring Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne and Kelly McGillis.
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 the world's first digital feature film.
In addition to his filmmaking, Paul teaches courses in screenwriting and film directing at the University of Virginia.
He was born in Louisville, Kentucky and earned a BA in English and an MA in Communications at the University of Kentucky. He currently 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 subjects in American culture.
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