Allen Moore

Allen Moore was born (1952) and raised in Baltimore, Maryland USA and its suburbs, earned a diploma from the Gilman Private High School For Boys in Baltimore, Maryland USA, and then attended Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he earned a BA degree in 1974. He then went onto begin a career as a movie cameraman, director, and producer in which career he is still active, most famously for work contributed to Ken Burns and Ric Burns television documentaries in the 1980's and 1990's. For over 30 years Allen Moore has been active as an independent filmmaker - producing, directing, photographing, and editing his own 16mm documentary work. He also worked as an adjunct faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art (aka "MICA"), located in Baltimore, Maryland USA. He has taught classes in movie production at MICA. These movie production have included 1) a Special Projects production class, where students created two one-minute shorts, shot in super 16mm film, reminding patrons at the Charles Theater in Baltimore to please turn off their cell phones, 2) a 15 minute documentary video about the Charter Schools of Maryland, shot in the Sony HDV format, that has been used as an advocacy tool for the local charter school community and 3) a documentary project being produced in the Panasonic DVCProHD High Definition format, promoting Biodiesel as a renewable energy source, while at the same time encouraging environmental stewardship. Moore has served as a director of photography for several of Ken Burns historical films shown on PBS, including the multi-part series The Civil War and Baseball, the two-part series, Thomas Jefferson , as well as Lewis and Clark, Mark Twain, and Horatios Drive. Moore's cinematography for The Civil War and, most recently, The War, captured a national audience. In 1981, Moore completed The Shepherds of Berneray, (56 min.), a documentary of a year's time in the life of a Gaelic-speaking island community in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. It has won a CINE Golden Eagle, a Red Ribbon at the American Film Festival, and a Special Mention of the Jury at Cinema du Reel. Soon afterwards, Moore received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Filmmaking from December, 1982 to November, 1983. "Moore has become renowned in filmmaking circles for the way he portrays the intimate relationship of a culture to its environment, a vision he calls primarily poetic," wrote Baltimore Sun critic Linell Smith about his award-winning film Black Water, (28 min.), produced in 1990. Black Water is a documentary portrait of an artisanal fishing village in northeastern Brazil which is struggling to survive the impact of industrial water pollution. Moore's next film, A Sheepherder's Homecoming, (40 min.), was completed in 1996. It is a stylized documentary combining personal history, verite camerawork, polemical voice-over, and a rousing music track to record the life of a Mexican migrant, working as a sheepherder in the Nevada desert, and his eventual return to his home in Mexico. In the fall of 2000, Moore completed The Pursuit of Truth: 200 Years at Middlebury College, (40 min.). This program is a documentary portrait of Middlebury College, vividly illustrating its dynamic 200 year history, as it has grown to be one of the most venerable and influential liberal arts institutions in the country today. This Betacam SP video production received a CINE Golden Eagle in 2001. Most recently, in January of 2004, Moore completed Albert Alcalay: Self Portraits, (56 min.), an inspiring documentary reflecting the extraordinary life and engaging personality of painter and teacher Albert Alcalay. Moore has received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maryland State Arts Council. He has been the director of photography on many successful documentaries, including Wild by Law, The Donner Party, The Way West, Divide Highways, The Harriman Expedition, New York (The Series), Monkey Trial, and Store Wars. Moore's cinematography on Wild by Law helped it earn an Academy Award Nomination in the Documentary Feature category in 1992. Moore received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Cinematography for his work on the Ken Burns' series Baseball in 1995. He received another Primetime Emmy Award nomination in August, 2000 for his cinematography work on Ric Burns' American Experience series New York. Most recently, his cinematography on the Nebraska ETV/American Experience program Monkey Trial helped it earn a George Foster Peabody Award for 2002. In addition to pursuing his film production career, Moore served as a full-time visiting faculty member of the Electronic Media and Film Department at Towson University during the fall of 2004 and spring of 2005. Since the fall of 2004, he has also served as a faculty member in the Video Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).