Scott Z. Burns (BA ‘85) Named Keynote Speaker for Undergrad Commencement
Scott Z. Burns is a screenwriter, director, producer, and playwright with a record of involvement in prominent projects tackling essential issues of 21st-century life. He wrote the screenplay for Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, which eerily presaged COVID-19 and became a pandemic-era mainstay. His 2025 podcast about human creativity in the age of AI, What Could Go Wrong?, was recognized as one of the 20 Best Audiobooks of 2025.
Burns produced the Academy Award-winning climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, for which he received the Humanitas Prize, and executive-produced An Inconvenient Sequel and Sea of Shadows, which won the Sundance Audience Award. He is the writer, director, executive producer, and creator of the Apple TV series Extrapolations, which won an Environmental Media Association Award as well as a Norman Lear Award for its speculative storytelling about life on earth in the years 2037 through 2070.
Beyond their timeliness, his projects reveal a compassionate interest in the varied facets of the human story, from comic absurdity to breathless adventure, tragic cruelty to selfless sacrifice. Burns’s writing credits include The Bourne Ultimatum as well as Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!, The Laundromat, and Side Effects. His next writing project is adapting American Psycho for director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name). He wrote and directed PU-239, the story of a radiation-exposed nuclear plant worker in Russia, and The Report, a dramatic retelling of political intrigue about CIA torture post-9/11. Over his career, Burns has directed and/or written for a storied range of actors: Meryl Streep, Forest Whitaker, Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Oscar Isaac, Edward Norton, Marion Cotillard, and Daveed Diggs, among many others. He is an executive producer of the HBO series Dune: Prophecy.
Burns is a frequent advisor at the Sundance Institute and a member of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Leadership Committee. He attended the University of Minnesota, where he graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English Literature.
I’m excited to come back to the U and excited to be back in the Twin Cities. I always felt that I was, first and foremost, a Minnesotan. Some of that had to do with the geography of Minnesota and the climate, and the sense of accomplishment at surviving a winter. I always felt that it was kind of a test both physically and intellectually to get through it. But this year is different. When I was watching the news and saw people out in the streets protesting, what that protest really was about for me was how people in Minneapolis tend to take care of each other, whether it’s helping your neighbor get their car out of the snowbank or just a sense of community and neighborly obligation. And I was profoundly moved by that. It makes coming back this year really meaningful to me.
Scott Z. Burns
