David McMahon

Director, Writer, Producer for Muhammad Ali

David McMahon has been making award-winning documentary films for more than a decade. With Ken Burns and Sarah Burns, he wrote, directed and produced The Central Park Five, a two-hour film about the five teenagers who were wrongly convicted in the Central Park Jogger case of 1989, which won a Peabody Award and Best Non-Fiction Film of 2012 from The New York Film Critics Circle.

In 2016, he again teamed with Ken Burns and Sarah Burns to direct and produce Jackie Robinson, a two-part, four-hour biography of the baseball and civil rights icon, for which he and Sarah Burns were nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Non-Fiction program and won a WGA Award for documentary script.

Recently, he and Sarah Burns directed and produced East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story, a two-hour film about a housing project in Atlanta, which premiered on PBS in March of 2020. Raised in Clarence, New York, and a graduate of the University of Michigan, McMahon lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, Sarah Burns, and their two children.