USA

Laura Poitras is is a filmmaker, journalist, and artist. She is the director of My Country, My Country (2006), the first part of a trilogy of films about America post 9/11. The film was nominated for an Academy Award, Independent Spirit Award, and Emmy Award. The second film, The Oath (2010), received a Gotham Award for Best Documentary, the Cinematography Award at Sundance, and the Directing Award at Cinema Eye Honors. The 9/11 Trilogy was selected for the 2012 Whitney Biennial. She is the recipient of a 2012 MacArthur Fellowship. Her video installation, O’Say Can You See (2011), premiered at the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center and had its New York premiere at the Ronald Feldman Gallery. Poitras received a Peabody Award and an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Flag Wars (2003), a film made with Linda Goode Bryant. She was executive producer of Ra’anan Alexandrovicz’ The Law In These Parts (2011), winner of the Sundance Film Festival World Cinema Jury Prize. Her films have been shown at numerous film festivals, and have received support from ITVS, the Sundance Institute, Vital Projects Fund, Creative Capital, American Documentary|POV, the Tribeca Film Institute, and the Bertha BRITDOC Documentary Journalism Fund. Her films are distributed by Zeitgeist Films. Her 2015 documentary, Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden, won the Academy Award and BAFTA Best Documentary Feature awards that year. She has attended the Sundance Institute Documentary Storytelling Lab as both a fellow and creative advisor. She has taught documentary filmmaking at Yale University, and was a visiting artist at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Before making films she worked as a professional chef.

Filmography

Exact Fantasy (1995)
Living the Legacy: Racism and Resistance in the Academy (1998)
Flag Wars (2003)
My Country, My Country (2006)
The Oath (2010)
O’Say Can You See (2011)
Citizenfour (2015)
Risk (2016)
Project X (2016)