BIOGRAPHY

Andrew (André) Stern, born in Munich, Germany in 1931, worked as a documentary photographer in the late fifties and early sixties in New York and Washington, DC. After graduating from Dartmouth in 1952, and spending a year at the University of Geneva and the Sorbonne in Paris, he interned with the photographer Hans Namuth, known for his widely published photographs of abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning and Enrico Donati. Later he worked for the New York Herald Tribune, before moving to Washington DC as a radio producer for the Voice of America. From there, he went to work for Howard K. Smith at ABC News. When we made a documentary titled "The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon," ABC cancelled the program because some of the national advertisers were offended by the title, including Schick Razor Blades. Stern was hired by the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University as an adjunct professor. That fall, he became a producer of the WNET program "SOUL!," the first broadcast which featured exclusively black music and public affairs, which won a Peabody Award.

Later, he worked at NET (early PBS) where he produced half-hour and hour programs, including "Hiroshima, 1965," "Brunswick, GA," "The Quiet Conflict," and many others which are available on this website.

In 1969, Stern was invited to start a new program in broadcast journalism, documentary, and photography at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1981 Stern produced "How Much Is Enough?: Decision Making in the Nuclear Age," filmed in the United States and Europe. This documentary was broadcast nationwide by PBS and 6 European countries and received many awards including the George Polk Award, the Thomas Storke Award, the Edward Weintal Prize, and Best Documentary at the U.S. Film Festival Park City (a precursor to the Sundance Film Festival). After retiring in 1994, Stern spent five years traveling back and forth between his home in Berkeley and the former Soviet Union, where he worked with young journalists and newly independent television stations. After returning to Berkeley in the late nineties, he devoted his time to scanning and reprinting his past work. Stern continues to take photographs and travel widely. He currently lives and works in Berkeley.