Kurt Sayenga

Kurt Sayenga is a Los Angeles-based writer, director, and producer. He is the executive producer/showrunner of the seven-part documentary series Eli Roth's History of Horror, which airs on AMC. History of Horror is part of the AMC Visionaries strand exploring the artistic and sociopolitical roots of popular culture. Sayenga wrote and directed all seven episodes of the series and interviewed 92 of the 99 people featured in it. Interviewees include a host of film scholars and creators including Stephen King, Quentin Tarantino, Diablo Cody, Jack Black, Tippi Hedren, John Landis, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jordan Peele, Doug Jones, Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, Joe Dante, Roger Corman, Richard Donner, Dean Cundey, Robert Englund, Tobin Bell, Tony Todd, Stuart Gordon, Bryan Fuller, Howard Shore, Mary Harron, Tom Savini, Joe Hill, Victor LaValle, Bruce Campbell, Craig T. Nelson, Leonard Maltin, the Soska Sisters and Leigh Whannell.

Kurt Sayenga
Alma materUniversity of Michigan
OccupationWriter, director, producer
Years active1992–present
AwardsEmmy Award
Websitehttp://kurtsayenga.com/

In 2017, Sayenga was the executive producer/showrunner of the 2017 National Geographic special Titanic: 20 Years Later with James Cameron and the eight-part National Geographic docuseries Origins, hosted by Jason Silva. He was also the EP/showrunner of the science anthology series Breakthrough,[1] a coproduction of National Geographic Channel, GE, Imagine Entertainment, and Asylum Entertainment.[2] The first season of the series, which premiered in 2015, featured films directed by Ron Howard, Paul Giamatti, Angela Bassett, Peter Berg, Akiva Goldsman, and Brett Ratner. The second season, which premiered May 2017,[3] featured films directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, David Lowery, Shane Carruth and Kurt Sayenga, The Malloys, Steven Hoggard, and Shalini Kantayya.

Previously, Sayenga was an executive producer at Revelations Entertainment, where he wrote, directed, and produced 15 episodes of the Emmy-nominated series Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.

Biography

Throughout his young adulthood Sayenga was active in the Washington, D.C. punk music scene. He created, edited, and was the head writer of Greed Magazine in the late 1980s,[4] one of the first magazines to fuse coverage of underground music, literature and "high" and "low" art. On the pop culture side, Greed featured interviews with acts such as Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, Daniel Johnston, The Swans, Wire, Plasticland, Rites of Spring, Live Skull, and Robyn Hitchcock, plus comics figures Los Bros Hernandez, Charles Burns, Peter Bagge, Chester Brown and Clive Barker. Greed featured the debut of Evan Dorkin's Milk and Cheese in its final issue.

Sayenga also designed albums for the Dischord Records label, most notably Fugazi's first six packages: Fugazi, Margin Walker, 13 Songs, Repeater,Steady Diet of Nothing, and the 7" 3 Songs.

A graduate of the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science & the Arts, Sayenga won the Jules and Avery Hopwood Award for Drama and the Roy M. Cowden Fellowship.

His television career started at the Discovery Channel, where he wrote, directed and produced the special Nighthawk: Secrets of the Stealth Fighter, the mini-series Wings Over the Gulf, and the 13-part series Fields of Armor, a survey of mechanized warfare in the 20th Century. He won an Emmy for the design of the opening credits of Fields of Armor, along with several writing and producing awards.

During his time running the production company Arcwelder Films (which he founded with Martha Adams), Sayenga wrote, directed and produced many more documentaries, including Spies Above, Robots Rising, Explosive Situations, High Speed Impacts, Inside the Kill Box (made on the tenth anniversary of the first Gulf War and featuring interviews with players such as George H. W. Bush and Dick Cheney), and the engineering series Skyscrapers: Going Up, Bridges: Reaching Out, and Tunnels: Digging In. He was also showrunner of Animal Nightmares, a 13-part series for National Geographic International; and Microkillers, a mini-series for National Geographic about pandemic diseases that fused fictional scenarios with documentary content.

In 2006 Sayenga formed a new production company called Command and Control Creative Services, which has produced ancillary content for companies such as 20th Century Fox International, United Artists/MGM, and Disney. In 2008 Sayenga worked with Bill Nye, the Science Guy, as executive producer/showrunner of Stuff Happens, for Discovery Communications' Planet Green. He has also produced several science-based pieces with Nye for Disney Educational Products and The Planetary Society.

References

Notes
  1. Breakthrough official website.
  2. "Science Meets Hollywood in Nat Geo's 'Breakthrough,'" RealScreen.com (Oct. 30, 2015).
  3. Breakthrough, retrieved 2017-05-03
  4. Little, Ryan. "Nothing but a Number: A Live History of Fugazi's Song 'Repeater'," Washington City Paper (DEC. 2, 2011).

Sources consulted
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