Laura Poitras

Laura Poitras is an esteemed American director and producer of documentary films, born on February 2, 1964, in Boston, Massachusetts. She has received many prestigious awards, including the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Citizenfour, which chronicles the story of Edward Snowden. Her documentary, My Country, My Country was nominated in the same category in 2007. Her contributions, alongside Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Barton Gellman to the NSA disclosures earned them the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and the George Polk Award in 2013 for national security reporting. In 2022, her documentary film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, exploring the career of Nan Goldin and the fall of the Sackler family, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Poitras also co-founded the online newspaper, The Intercept, but was dismissed from the First Look Media, the parent company, in 2020 due to her stance on The Intercept's handling of the Reality Winner controversy. Her early films include Flag Wars (2003) and The Oath (2010). Besides these notable films, she also made remarkable contributions such as The Program, based on interviews with William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency. Additional influential works of hers include the award-winning Citizenfour (2014), 1971 (co-produced film), and Risk (2016).