
David Fanning
Biography
David Fanning has been executive producer of Frontline , America’s only regularly scheduled investigative documentary series on television, since its first season in 1983. The series has won all the major awards for broadcast journalism, including 34 Emmys, 23 duPont-Columbia University Awards, 12 Peabody Awards, and 11 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. In 2002, the series was honored with an unprecedented third Gold Baton from duPont-Columbia for its post September 11th coverage, a series of seven hour-long documentaries on the origins and impact of terrorism. In 2003, “A Dangerous Business,” a Frontline / New York Times joint investigation of the cast-iron pipe making industry, won the Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Fanning began his filmmaking career as a young journalist in South Africa. He came to the US in 1973 and began producing and directing local and national documentaries for KOCE, a public television station in California. In 1977, Fanning came to WGBH Boston to start the international documentary series WORLD.
| Title | Year | Job | 
|---|---|---|
| Frank Terpil: Confessions of a Dangerous Man | 1982 | Producer | 
| Hostage in Iran | 1986 | Executive Producer | 
| War on Nicaragua | 1987 | Executive Producer | 
| The Killer at Thurston High | 2000 | Executive Producer | 
| Burden of Innocence | 2003 | Executive Producer | 
| The New Asylums | 2005 | Executive Producer | 
| Frontline: The Age of AIDS | 2006 | Executive Producer | 
| The Released | 2009 | Executive Producer | 
| The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan | 2010 | Executive Producer | 
| Facing Death | 2010 | Executive Producer | 
| Lost in Detention | 2011 | Executive Producer | 
| Nuclear Aftershocks | 2012 | Executive Producer | 
| Dollars and Dentists | 2012 | Executive Producer | 
| The Suicide Plan | 2012 | Executive Producer | 
| Outlawed in Pakistan | 2013 | Executive Producer | 
| Snitch | 2013 | Executive Producer | 
| To Catch A Trader | 2014 | Producer | 
| The Rise of ISIS | 2014 | Executive Producer | 
| Terror in Europe | 2016 | Executive Producer | 
| Out of Gitmo | 2017 | Executive Producer | 
| The Fish on My Plate | 2017 | Writer | 
| Mosul | 2017 | Executive Producer | 
| Predator on the Reservation | 2019 | Executive Producer | 
| Frontline: In the Age of AI | 2019 | Producer | 
| Once Upon a Time in Iraq | 2020 | Executive Producer | 
| President Biden | 2021 | Executive Producer | 
| The Healthcare Divide | 2021 | Executive Producer | 
| America After 9/11 | 2021 | Executive Producer | 
| Taliban Takeover | 2021 | Executive Producer | 
| Plot to Overturn the Election | 2022 | Executive Producer | 
| After Uvalde: Guns, Grief & Texas Politics | 2023 | Executive Producer | 
| America's Dangerous Trucks | 2023 | Executive Producer | 
| Inside the Uvalde Response | 2023 | Executive Producer | 
| Documenting Police Use of Force | 2024 | Executive Producer |