About Paul Stekler

Paul Stekler’s documentaries about American politics have won numerous national honors including multiple Emmys, Peabodys and du-Pont-Columbia Journalism awards, and have all been aired nationally on PBS.  His films include Sundance Special Jury Prize winner “George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire”; “Vote for Me: Politics in America,” a two-night national PBS special co-directed with Daniel McCabe; two of the “Eyes on the Prize“ civil rights history series films; Frontline’s “The Choice 2008,” about the Obama-McCain election race; and three films broadcast on PBS’s POV series, “Getting Back to Abnormal,” about New Orleans and race relations after Katrina, , and “Louisiana Boys: Raised on Politics,” both made with longtime collaborators Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker, and "Last Man Standing: Politics Texas Style."  In 2016, along with Alvarez and Kolker, he produced a nine part, short film series on politics in nine states, “Postcards from the Great Divide,” done in association with the Washington Post. 

Paul Stekler grew up in Glen Rock, New Jersey, went to Williams College, and has a doctorate in American politics from Harvard University.  He was the chair of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas. He has written for the Washington Post, USA Today, and Texas Monthly among others.  “Killing Custer”, co-written with Native American novelist James Welch, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. 

He was a political pollster in New Orleans campaigns while teaching southern politics at Tulane and also played in New Orleans’ only working blue grass band, Wabash.  Articles about him include Real Austin Stories: Austin’s Exploding Documentary Scene (1988), Variety’s Mentor of the Year (2014), Stekler’s Archives Reveal Intersection of Film and Politics (2015), and A Look at the Political Documentaries of UT’s Paul Stekler (2017).

Finally, he was the “boss” in The Real World: Austin in the 2005 season of MTV’s reality television series, trying to teach the often drunk and distracted young housemates how to shoot, direct and edit a short film about the SXSW music festival.