Thomas F. Lennon has alternated between historical and contemporary subject matter. His work, broadcast on PBS and HBO, has been nominated three times for an Academy Award, winning once, and has received major television awards including two George Foster Peabody Awards, two national Emmys and two DuPont-Columbia Journalism awards. He co-directed the HBO film Unchained Memories, along with Ed Bell, based on readings from the WPA slave narratives. With filmmaker Ruby Yang, he mounted a vast multi-year AIDS prevention campaign seen over 900 million times on Chinese television. Together they made a trilogy of short documentary films about modern China, including The Blood of Yingzhou District, which won an Oscar in 2007, and The Warriors of Qiugang, nominated in 2011, which profiles an Anhui Province farmer's multi-year campaign to halt the poisoning of his village water by a nearby factory. Three weeks after the Oscar nomination, the local government of Bengbu, in Anhui, announced a 200 million yuan (US$30 million) clean-up of the toxic site shown in the film. He recently completed "Sacred," a global exploration of the role of prayer and ritual in daily life, to be aired on PBS; more than forty filmmakers around the world shot scenes for the film. He is editing a film about the hectic launch of an haute cuisine French restaurant in Cleveland, Edwins, in which almost all the staff have criminal records.