Ian Cheney

Roles: Director

Ian Cheney is an Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker. He grew up in New England and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Yale University. After graduate school, Ian co-created, co-produced and starred in the feature documentary King Corn, which aired on PBS and was awarded a George Foster Peabody Award in 2009. Ian subsequently directed the feature documentary The Greening of Southie, featured in The New Yorker and on Good Morning America; Truck Farm, the story of urban agriculture in New York City; The City Dark, a feature documentary about light pollution and the disappearing night; The Search for General Tso, a feature documentary about American Chinese food; Bluespace, which explores the terraforming of Mars and the waterways of New York City; and The Smog of the Sea, a collaboration with musician Jack Johnson about microplastics in the sea. His most recent film, The Most Unknown, is a feature documentary profiling 9 scientists working on the fringes of human knowledge, released theatrically by Abramorama.

He has also produced short films for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian and The Undark. A co-founder of FoodCorps, a nationwide public service organization, in 2011 he and longtime collaborator Curt Ellis were awarded the Heinz Award for their work in sustainability. In 2014-2015, Ian was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Formerly a visiting professor at the Università degli Studi di Scienze Gastronomiche in Italy, he is now an adjunct professor at Yale College. He lives in Maine.