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James Sanders

Biography

James Sanders

James Sanders is an architect, author and filmmaker whose work has garnered him a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Emmy, Peabody and DuPont-Columbia awards.

With Ric Burns, Mr. Sanders co-conceived and co-wrote the acclaimed eight-part PBS series, New York: A Documentary Film, and its companion volume, NEW YORK: An Illustrated History (Knopf, 1999). The series received six Emmy nominations, two Emmy Awards, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. Mr. Sanders also co-wrote Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, for which he won an Emmy Award for Nonfiction Writing in 2007.

Mr. Sanders' landmark study of the city in film, CELLULOID SKYLINE: New York and the Movies (Knopf, 2001) was hailed by the urbanist Jane Jacobs as a "marvelous --- miraculous –- book." His most recent book, SCENES FROM THE CITY: Filmmaking in New York, featuring contributions by Martin Scorsese and Nora Ephron, was published by Rizzoli in 2006. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, Architectural Record and elsewhere.

His firm, James Sanders + Associates, combines architecture, exhibition design, film, and new media to create projects such as a new public event and gallery space for New York University, called NYU Open House, and the multimedia orientation space, called "Timescapes," at the Museum of the City of New York (co-created with Local Projects), and the large-scale Celluloid Skyline exhibit in Grand Central Terminal (with Pentagram). The firm is also committed to urban improvement efforts, including a recent waterfront access project called Riverways, also developed with Pentagram. Private commissions include residential work for the New Yorker editor Bill Buford, Columbia professor Edward Said, and the actress Molly Ringwald. His projects have been featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Architect's Newspaper, Oculus, Interiors and Architectural Digest.

Mr. Sanders is a graduate of Columbia College and Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and attended the MIT School of Architecture. He sits on the Advisory Council of the AIA's Center for Architecture, the board of the Skyscraper Museum, and is the director of the Center for Urban Experience, a not-for-profit research group based in New York. In 2006 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for research in the experience of cities.

James Sanders

Books by James Sanders

Ric Burns and James Sanders, with Lisa Ades - History, Nonfiction

The book brims with vibrant illustrations, including hundreds of rare photographs, paintings, lithographs, prints and period maps. The narrative incorporates the voices and stories of men and women --- statesmen, entrepreneurs, artists, and visionaries --- who have lived in and built the city: an extraordinary cast of characters that includes Peter Stuyvesant, Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, Walt Whitman, Boss Tweed, Jacob Riis, Emma Lazarus, J. P. Morgan, Al Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Gershwin, Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.