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| Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet: Filmmaker Biography |
Michael Schwarz of Kikim Media
Michael Schwarz has been making award-winning television programs for more than 20 years. Schwarz's work has been honored with numerous honors, including: three national Emmy Awards, two George Foster Peabody Awards, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for Investigative Journalism, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, Red and Blue Ribbons from the American Film Festival, three Ciné Golden Eagles, four awards for Excellence in Local Broadcasting from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, numerous local Emmys, and the Grand Prize in the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for Coverage of the Disadvantaged.
After joining public television station KQED/San Francisco in 1988 and rising to the position of senior executive producer, Schwarz left the station in 1996 to found Kikim Media. The company's award-winning three-part series on juvenile justice, In Search of Law and Order, was shown nationally on PBS in April 1998.
Kikim has also produced several historical programs for national broadcast on PBS, including Naked to the Bone, an hour-long documentary about medical imaging technologies; Stopwatch, a one-hour program about the pioneering industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, based on Robert Kanigel's acclaimed book The One Best Way; and The Next Big Thing, based on Robert Pool's groundbreaking book, Beyond Engineering, which explores how social, political and economic forces have historically shaped the evolution of our dominant technologies. These documentaries were produced in conjunction with Quest Productions and funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Prior to leaving KQED in 1996, Schwarz executive produced Paul Ehrlich and the Population Bomb, which was broadcast nationally on PBS in April 1996, and brought to the station (through American Playhouse) Channel Four's Farmstead Mapping's Tales of the City, for which he served as KQED's executive producer and which won another George Foster Peabody Award. He also served as executive producer for The Smart Parent's Guide to TV Violence, a one-hour special with First Lady Hillary Clinton about how parents can deal with the effects of televised violence on their children, which was broadcast on PBS stations in the fall of 1996.
Schwarz brought national attention to KQED when he initiated a landmark First Amendment lawsuit against the State of California over the right of broadcast journalists to bring television cameras into the witness gallery in order to document an execution. The suit prompted a worldwide debate, extensively covered by the press, about both capital punishment and television journalism itself.
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