Ken Spurgeon - Kansas on Screen

Ask A Kansan
3 days ago
1 min read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja4sUQuRIxw

Ken Spurgeon is a Kansas historian and filmmaker known for bringing Midwestern stories to the screen with a storyteller’s eye and a scholar’s rigor. Raised in Wichita and now based in the Wichita-area (Andover), Ken is a professor of history at Friends University, where his lifelong love of biography, the Civil War era, and the American West fuels both his teaching and creative work. Alongside academia, he has built a body of film work rooted in Kansas people and places—projects shaped by years of hands-on historical research, reenactment experience, and a belief that Kansas stories deserve to be filmed in Kansas.

Ken is also a co-founder of Lone Chimney Films, a Midwest-focused documentary film organization he helped launch in 2004. His films have earned national recognition, including Western Heritage Awards (Bronze Wrangler) from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum—among them The Road to Valhalla and Home on the Range. In recent years, Ken has expanded further into narrative filmmaking, including the feature adaptation of the Kansas pioneer classic Sod and Stubble, continuing his mission to elevate regional history through cinema while mentoring the next generation of Kansas creatives in the classroom and on set.