Robert Stone is an Oscar®- nominee for Best Feature Documentary a three-time Emmy-nominee for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking and a winner of the 2020 Columbia duPont Award for Best Documentary, among many other awards and accolades for his work over three decades. Born in England in 1958, Stone grew up in both England and America. After graduating with a degree in history from the University of Wisconsin/Madison, he moved to New York City in 1983 determined to pursue a career in filmmaking. He gained considerable recognition for his first film, Radio Bikini (1987), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award®.

Multi-tasking as a producer, director, writer, editor and cameraman, Stone has over the last 35 years developed an esteemed international reputation for his unique and critically acclaimed feature-documentaries about American history, pop-culture, the mass media and the environment. Variety film critic Owen Gleiberman, who has championed his career, has called Stone “one of our most important documentary filmmakers,” for directing “two of the most explosively insightful documentaries of the last decade.” His best-known work includes Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (2004), which premiered at Sundance and went on to become one of the most highly-acclaimed theatrical documentaries of the year. The film was followed by the documentary feature Oswald’s Ghost (2007) for which Stone earned his second Emmy nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Non-Fiction Filmmaking. Earth Days (2009), which premiered as the closing night film at Sundance, traced the emergence of the environmental movement in the United States, from its beginnings in the 1950s to the first Earth Day celebration in 1970 and the political action that followed it. Pandora’s Promise (2013), an audience favorite at Sundance, gained world-wide acclaim and prompted considerable controversy by telling the intensely personal stories of environmentalists who have undergone a radical conversion from being fiercely anti- to strongly pro-nuclear energy. Inspired by his filmmaking on environmental issues, Stone is among 18 scientists, scholars and environmentalists who in 2015 co-authored of the Ecomodernist Manifesto, a highly influential proposal to rethink the meaning of environmentalism to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Stone’s most recent work, Chasing the Moon (2019), is an epic political and social history of the race to the moon, broadcast on PBS as a three-part six-hour miniseries to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing. Broadcast in 13 countries on four continents, the film was seen by nearly 8 million viewers in the United States alone and earned Stone his third Emmy nomination for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking. Stone also co-wrote, with Alan Andres, the companion book Chasing the Moon, published by Random House. He is currently in post-production on Taken Hostage (2022), a four-hour documentary about the Iranian Revolution and the Hostage Crisis.

Stone continues to create personally-crafted documentary films from his home in the Hudson Valley of New York, where he lives with his wife, Shelby Stone, a film and television producer, and his two sons.