Laura Poitras

Laura Poitras (; born February 2, 1964) is an American director and producer of documentary films.

Poitras has received numerous awards for her work, including the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for ''Citizenfour'', about Edward Snowden, while ''My Country, My Country'' received a nomination in the same category in 2007. She won the 2013 George Polk Award for national security reporting related to the NSA disclosures. The NSA reporting by Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Barton Gellman contributed to the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service awarded jointly to ''The Guardian'' and ''The Washington Post''. In 2022, her documentary film, ''All the Beauty and the Bloodshed'', which explores the career of Nan Goldin and the fall of the Sackler family, was awarded the Golden Lion, making it the second documentary to win the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. The film then won a Peabody Award at the 84th ceremony in 2024 for "capturing the zeal of an artist eager to use her work to create a new vision for and of the world."

She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, 2012 MacArthur Fellow, the creator of ''Field of Vision'', and one of the initial supporters of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. She was awarded the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence by Harvard's Nieman Foundation in 2014.

Poitras was one of the founding editors of the online newspaper, ''The Intercept''. On November 30, 2020, Poitras was fired by First Look Media, the parent company of ''The Intercept'', allegedly in relation to her criticism of ''The Intercept'''s handling of the Reality Winner controversy. Provided by Wikipedia