Feb. 25, 2025
Contact: Sara Diedrich, diedrichs@missouri.edu
Photos by Nate Brown
Leaders from the University of Missouri and Missouri School of Journalism’s Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism have announced a $10.3 million gift from its founding donor and namesake, Jonathan Murray, BJ ’77.
Coming as the Murray Center celebrates the beginning of its second decade, the gift will expand the professional and educational opportunities available to both undergraduate and graduate students, make filmmaking resources available to the center’s alumni and further raise the profile of a documentary film program uniquely situated within a journalism school.
“The Murray Center has a national reputation for innovation and excellence,” said University of Missouri President Mun Choi. “Jon Murray’s incredible gift will continue to support our talented faculty and students as they tell important stories with impact. His visionary leadership is preparing a new generation of documentary journalists for success. We are grateful for his dedication to Mizzou.”
Under the leadership of Filmmaker-in-Chief Robert Greene and Supervising Producer Sebastián Martínez Valdivia, students at the Murray Center create documentaries ranging from shorts to feature-length films, some of which are increasingly finding success at film festivals. A key result of the gift will be more robust support for student filmmaking — support that could continue after students graduate, both in terms of financial assistance for production or distribution and help from a highly engaged alumni network as graduates work on professional films.
“The Murray Center is a natural extension of what the School of Journalism has done since 1908 — it extends our Missouri Method of hands-on learning into another realm of storytelling,” David Kurpius, dean of the School of Journalism, said. “I’m excited to offer more support for our students and help them build meaningful careers, and I could not ask for a better partner in that mission than Jon Murray.”
Coupled with a $6.7 million founding gift in 2014, this latest gift marks a total of $17 million in contributions to the center from Murray, known as an originator of reality television. Murray’s production company, Bunim-Murray, created influential projects like MTV’s groundbreaking 1992 show, “The Real World,” and has found continued success in shows such as “Project Runway” and “Keeping up with the Kardashians.” In 2006, Bunim-Murray created BMP Films, its documentary division, which has produced award-winning films including “Autism: The Musical” and “Valentine Road.”
For Murray, investing in the center means building on the foundations of a community that already features True/False Film Fest, a nationally renowned documentary film festival, to make Columbia, Missouri, the Midwest’s epicenter for documentary journalism.
“This is a place where we’re taking the documentary world, which has primarily been led by people on the two coasts, and we’re bringing in that voice from the Midwest,” Murray said. “I think that is vital. Maybe these students will tell stories that documentary filmmakers on the coasts haven’t thought of. What we’re doing with this funding is supporting something that is already starting to happen, and now it can really take off.”
Accordingly, the gift will allow the Murray Center to form a deeper partnership with True/False and its umbrella nonprofit, Ragtag Film Society, for the benefit of students and the local community. It will also formalize a network of alumni around the country who come together regularly to offer mutual support and, crucially, connections in a highly competitive industry.
One such means of connection will be through the Murray Center’s Visiting Artist program, which brings documentary filmmakers and other figures in the industry into the classroom to offer their firsthand insights into the documentary world. Martínez said the program is a crucial part of helping students get their ideas off the ground and, ultimately, into suitable shape for big-screen showings at the local Missouri Theatre through the center’s production company, Method M Films.
“These are working professionals who come in and judge our students' ideas,” Martínez said. “And then when students are given the go-ahead, they spend their last year in the program working on these films. Filming them, editing them, doing all the post-production work that's involved with that, it's really hands-on and there is a lot of creative freedom.”
Filmmaker-in-Chief Greene, himself a successful working documentarian with acclaimed films under his belt, has used his own connections to bring in Oscar winners and other industry titans to work with students. Murray’s gift enables a leap forward for the program, he said.
“Jon Murray’s gift gives us the freedom to bring in artists who don’t go to other schools, to bring them to Ragtag Cinema and have them screen their work in an art house theater for the public and for our students,” Greene said. “That sort of connection is unique and it’s very Columbia — small but big.”
