Kwapis directs America Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn, Alexis Bledel, and Blake Lively in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Ken Kwapis (born August 17, 1957, Belleville, Illinois) is an American film and television director and scriptwriter. Kwapis studied film first at Northwestern University and then on the graduate level at USC School of Cinema-Television. He helped define the single-camera sitcom in the 1990s and 2000s.
His thesis film For Heaven's Sake, a variation on a Mozart opera, won a Student Academy Award. He started making teen-oriented TV movies before working on acclaimed series such as The Larry Sanders Show. Since then he has mixed theatrical features with TV work. In 2005, he directed his first feature-length film (Sexual Life) that was based on his own original screenplay.
Kwapis ran a film society while in college and his knowledge of film history is evident in his work. For example, Dunston Checks In is virtually an homage to Ernst Lubitsch and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants features a clip from Frank Borzage's Three Comrades. In Sisterhood's DVD commentary Kwapis remarks on Borzage's influence on his work.
