Burnham Ware is a retired filmmaker and photographer who worked for Living Blues magazine and held a position in the Libraries and Archives department of the Kentucky State Government for twenty-seven years. He has had photographs published in twenty publications, books, and newspapers, and completed five short films in the 1980s on various topics. From the 1980s into the early 1990s, Ware attended multiple events across Kentucky and filmed them on his personal Super 8mm camera, including protests, a KKK rally, and multiple university lectures by Black thinkers and writers.

The Burnham Ware Collection is comprised of several of these Super 8mm films that Mr. Ware donated to the BFC/A in 1993, featuring lectures by Gloria Naylor, Houston A. Baker, Terry McMillan, and Alex Haley at Georgetown and Kentucky State Universities. Taken together, Mr. Ware's films not only help document the ideas of several Black writers and speakers during the 1980s, but also highlight the often-overlooked importance of Black amateur filmmakers in recording and capturing social and political events of their day.

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