Biography
Thomas Jennings has been making films for FRONTLINE since 2009. His first, Law and Disorder, on police shootings in New Orleans, won the prestigious George Polk Award and was nominated for an Emmy Award. Jennings then directed the Emmy-nominated A Perfect Terrorist and its sequel, American Terrorist (2011, 2015), was a producer on the landmark documentary series, Money, Power & Wall Street (2012), and wrote and directed Being Mortal (2015), with New Yorker writer Atul Gawande.
He directed Right to Fail (2019), about people with severe mental illness living independently, Opioids, Inc (2020), and then made Whose Vote Counts, which won the 2021 Peabody Award and NABJ Award. His next film, Boeing's Fatal Flaw (2021), an investigation with The New York Times into the 737-MAX crashes, received an Emmy Award. Jennings spent 2022 reporting and filming in Ukraine as he directed Putin's Attack on Ukraine: Documenting War Crimes, a 90-minute investigative collaboration with the AP detailing Russian military atrocities and holding accountable those most responsible. It won the Tom Renner IRE Medal, the Overseas Press Club Award, and three Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Awards, including the Grand Prize.
In all, Jennings has received the Peabody Award, three Emmy Awards, the duPont-Columbia Award, the NABJ Award, two Overseas Press Club Awards, three RFK Human Rights Awards, the Deadline Club Award, the Loeb Award, and six Writers Guild of America Awards. He has taught documentary film and investigative reporting at NYU, and advised students at Columbia University and Cooper Union.
