Film Odyssey

Film Odyssey has produced high-quality cultural and educational programming for the American television audience since its incorporation in 1986, exploring the visual arts and literature, American history and music, cinema and science, and featuring the nation’s most respected journalists and actors, including Rene Auberjunois, Ruby Dee, Barbara Feldon, John Heard, Dennis Hopper, Anjelica Huston, Kevin Kline, Roger Mudd, George Page, Cliff Robertson, Wes Studi, Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver

Broadcast by PBS and distributed internationally Film Odyssey’s nationally recognized programming has profiled American cultural figures; reached back hundreds of years to tell the story of the Makah Indians on the Olympic Peninsula; documented the creation of the world’s sixth largest cathedral; chronicled the contributions of German filmmakers to American cinema; and detailed the life-changing contributions of a law that changed the course of American history.

Film Odyssey’s most recent production, James McNeill Whistler & The Case for Beauty, was broadcast nationally in September on PBS.  The company is currently scripting a documentary on American 19th-century social change, and is in research/development for a project on the visual arts.

Recognized for its steadfast commitment to cultural journalism and high production values, Film Odyssey receives project support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and other major U.S. funders.  The company has also garnered accolades and coverage in the leading news media.

Counted among Film Odyssey’s productions are its 2009 release, Cinema’s Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood, a two-hour documentary on the men and women forced from the German film industry by Adolf Hitler, and three specials broadcast in PBS’ Emmy award-winning AMERICAN MASTERS series … Isaac Stern: Life’s Virtuoso; Robert Rauschenberg: Inventive Genius and Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul.   Other productions in the catalog are The GI Bill: The Law That Changed America; Indian America: A Gift from the Past, two specials on the Bill of Rights, Search and Seizure: The Supreme Court and the Police and The Supreme Court’s Holy Battles; and Washington National Cathedral.  Film Odyssey has also provided production services for the television series Dinosaurs! and for a production with the Wanapum Indian Band of Hanford, Washington.

Film Odyssey is a 501-c-3 organization in Washington, DC.  Karen Thomas is president and secretary; Werner S. Gundersheimer, former director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, is vice-president; Walter Carozza, Esq is secretary; Robert Brown and Nancy Porter are at-large members.  Film Odyssey has worked in the past with major producing stations WNET, WETA, WHYY and KCET.

Karen Thomas, Principal

Anaward-winning producer, writer and director whose PBS documentaries include 14 prime-time productions, and two more in pre-production and development, Karen Thomas has contributed 16 hours of cultural programming to the national PBS television schedule in her career.