About
In a fifty-year long career in journalism Gordon Henderson has written, directed or produced well over one hundred current affairs programs or documentaries, many of which have aired around the world and won national and international awards.
Henderson began his career as an on-air parliamentary correspondent for Global Television News covering Pierre Trudeau from 1974-1979. He then moved behind the camera to current affairs production with CBC’s The Journal and CTV’s W5 where he was the senior field producer. He produced stories from Beijing to Buenos Aires, London to Lebanon.
He started 90th Parallel Productions in 1987. 90th Parallel Productions has become one of Canada’s busiest documentary production companies, producing performing arts films, social and political exposés, sports documentaries, many science and adventure films for, among others, CBC, CTV, History Television, ARTE, BBC and PBS. 90th produced four films on the war in Afghanistan and Henderson spent a month with Canadian troops in 2006 writing and directing The Crazy Eights which aired on CBC. The Globe and Mail called the award-winning documentary, “must see TV.”His career was in journalism, but history has always been his first love. He was a senior series producer of the celebrated CBC/Radio-Canada Canada: A People’s History. The thirty-one-hour series, the CBC’s millennium project, attracted the largest audience for a documentary series ever broadcast in Canada. He won a Gemini Award for his work on Canada: A People’s History. With 90th Parallel Productions, he oversaw a four-part series on the building of the CPR for History Television and Underground Railroad: The William Still Story starring Dion Johnston, which ran nationally in the United States on PBS.
For more than a decade he taught in the Journalism department at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). Henderson was profiled in the Ryerson Review of Journalism. www.rrj.ca/keeping-it-reel/
He has sat on a number of volunteer boards including Face the Future, a medical missions foundation, Opera Atelier, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Dixon Hall, a community service agency. He is now on the board of The Canadian Institute for Historical Education and The Arts and Letters Club.
He lives in Toronto with his wife, Pam. They have three grown children and seven grandchildren.