Perry Miller Adato (1920-2018) was an American documentary film producer, director, and writer whose work focused primarily on other artists. The subjects of her work included poets Gertrude Stein and Carl Sandburg and painters Mary Cassatt and Georgia O'Keeffe.
Perry Miller Adato's first attempt to combine documentary techniques with dramatic re-enactment. The film uses actor John Cullum both as himself and to play the young Sandburg in short dramatic sequences. In search of Sandburg, Cullum travels to the poet's native home, Galesburg, Illinois speaking with close friends and family of the writer. Through a remarkable recently discovered trove of period photographs of Galesburg, the small-town America of Sandburg's childhood - the horse carriages, the ice-man delivering ice, a Fourth of July celebration - is revived in vivid detail.
Release Date1982-03-02
DepartmentProduction
JobProducer
This documentary portrait is the first to celebrate the only American member of the French Impressionist school and the first American woman to become a famous painter. 'Mary Cassatt Impressionist From Philadelphia' is not only a biography of the artist’s life and work; the film sees both in the context of the status of the woman painter in Victorian America in the second half of the 19th century.
Release Date1977-01-01
DepartmentProduction
JobProducer
Documentary about radio comedies primarily focused on Burns & Allen, Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy, The Jack Benny Program, Fibber McGee & Molly, The Bob Hope Show, and The Fred Allen Show.
Release Date1971-05-11
DepartmentDirecting
JobDirector
Vote Count1
A storm of Modernism swept through the art worlds of the West in the early decades of the twentieth century, uprooting centuries of tradition. The epicenter of this storm was Paris, France. For an incandescent moment from 1905 to 1930, Paris was the magnetic center for radical innovation and experiment, and the Mecca for creative talents who would change the course of art throughout the Western world.
Release Date2010-12-14
DepartmentDirecting
JobDirector
Vote Count1
First broadcast on October 2, 1989, these 18 original 30-minute episodes provide a panorama of 2000 years of architecture, painting and sculpture, and studies the art masterpieces as reflections of the Western culture that produced them.
DepartmentCreator
JobCreator
Vote Count1
Georgia O'Keeffe appears on camera for the first time to talk candidly about her work and her life in this 1977 documentary.
Release Date1977-11-11
DepartmentDirecting
JobDirector
The thoughts, words, and compelling presence of Gertrude Stein flows richly through this portrait of the author's Paris years from 1905 through the 1930s.
Release Date1970-12-20
DepartmentDirecting
JobDirector
A 30-minute film about Helen Frankenthaler, who invented the stained canvas at the age of 24 and influenced a whole generation of "color field" painters.
Release Date1978-01-01
DepartmentProduction
JobProducer
Filmed on location in Asia, four beloved stories of India, Indonesia, Korea and Japan are told thru the masterpieces of visual art and the stirring performances these tales have inspired for centuries.
Release Date1995-01-01
DepartmentDirecting
JobDirector
