“Serendipity is the watchword of Riders of the Purple Sage – the classic Zane Grey novel of Western adventure that will return to Arizona as, of all things, an opera. If an aspiring dime novelist hadn’t tried to capture the soaring grandeur of the West in words; if a treasured Arizona painter hadn’t wondered how to wrap that grandeur around a human story; or if a restless composer hadn’t discovered the dead novelist’s ephemera while ducking out of a Payson rainstorm, local opera fans would have nothing more in their Christmas stocking than the possibility of watching the nice lady from La Bohème get sick. Yet again.”
Co-producer of the Riders world premiere and a visionary driver of this project since its inception, Arizona native Kristin Atwell Ford is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker who captured the five-year creation of Riders in a feature-length documentary.
Riders of the Purple Sage: The Making of a Western Opera follows Zane Grey’s experiences writing his iconic novel and the synthesis of artists coming together a century later to build a multi-dimensional live performance through music, visual arts, and the human voice.
Atwell is no stranger to such synthesis, having grown up with an uncommon immersion in both theatre and wilderness adventures. Between apprenticeships at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, teaching writing at Perry-Mansfield School of Performing Arts, and graduating from Stephens College with a dual degree in English and Women’s Studies, Kristin explored the canyons and rivers of the American Southwest.
Kristin worked at Concentric Media in San Francisco for seven years with Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Dorothy Fadiman. During that time, she produced her first environmental film, Quartzite’s Fall: A Wilderness Tale. The short is narrated by Peter Coyote and screened with the 2001 Best of the Banff Mountain Film World Tour.
After returning to Arizona, the home of so many themes that inspire her work, Kristin became the in-house producer for Quantum Leap Productions (QLP), the team on Riders. In 2011, Kristin co-directed and wrote the documentary, Theodore Roosevelt Dam: Arizona’s Living Legacy. Narrated by Peter Coyote and produced by Salt River Project, it won the regional Emmy Award for best historical documentary.
In 2012, Kristin produced the nine-part The Arizona Centennial Series that aired on PBS/KAET. The series welcomed notable guests to recount Arizona’s colorful political history with former United States Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Kristin wrote and co-produced another documentary for SRP about forests, fire, and water. Protecting the Source aired on PBS/KAET and won the 2016 regional Emmy Award for special environmental program.
Atwell’s latest project with the QLP team, “Castle Hot Springs: Oasis of Time,” won the 2020 regional Emmy Award for historical documentary and is now available on Amazon Prime and iTunes.
Header image by Robert Pflumm, courtesy of Quantum Leap Productions