American documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has inked an exclusive deal with PBS, which will air his works until 2022.

Paula Kerger, chief of the U.S. public network, confirmed the 53-year-old director has signed a deal that is essentially a lifetime contract.

"What it represents is an extra commitment from Ken that he's planning to spend the rest of his professional life working with public television," said Kerger at a Saturday meeting with television critics in California.

Burns launched his career through his Emmy-winning Civil War docu-series airing in 1990, following it up with Baseball in 1994 — which also won an Emmy — and 2001's Jazz serial. 

Kerger indicated Burns's upcoming 14-hour series on the Second World War, to be shown in September and called The War, would be another "one of those seminal events, not just in public broadcasting history, but in broadcast history."

Burns has said that he wanted to capture the memories of the people who fought in that war before they died. The series follows four American towns in different states through the war years, centering on both the soldiers and their families and friends left behind.

"The point of view is from ordinary people, who do the fighting and who do the dying in all wars," Burns said in an interview in November.

The filmmaker's other projects include one on the National Parks system and another about the Prohibition era in the U.S.

The Brooklyn-born Burns has won many awards in his professional life. The nine-episode Civil War series earned 40 major film and television awards, including two Emmy Awards, a Producer of the Year award from the Producers Guild of America, a Peabody and the $50,000 US Lincoln Prize.

His other noteworthy works include a documentary about the opening of the American frontier called The West (1996), one about architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the Emmy-winning Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2004) — about the first African-American heavyweight champion of the world.

With files from the Associated Press