Dawn Porter

When award-winning filmmaker Dawn Porter — who directed the upcoming Luther Vandross documentary Luther: Never Too Much — thinks of her favorite song by the legendary singer, she selects “So Amazing,” the timeless track he wrote and produced for Dionne Warwick and later recorded himself. But then she pauses. “I think it’s hard for me because I’m very attached to some scenes right now,” she says. Then she speaks about “Any Love,” Vandross’ autobiographical song about wanting to find the one and the…

Dawn Porter looks for stories of people who made history without asking. By following congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis in John Lewis: Good Trouble, or President Obama’s White House photographer Pete Souza in The Way I See It, she says she hopes to shade in between the lines of history.  In her most recent project, Hulu’s The Lady Bird Diaries, she fixates on Lady Bird Johnson’s life, relying largely on archival audio recordings that were released following the former first lady’s death in 2007. In her…