Laura Poitras

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

In 1992, Poitras moved to New York to pursue filmmaking.

In 1996, she graduated from The New School for Public Engagement with a bachelor's degree.

He stated that the program he worked on had been designed for foreign espionage, but was converted in 2001 to spying on citizens in the United States, prompting concerns by him and others that the actions were illegal and unconstitutional and that led to their disclosures.

The Program implied that a facility being built at Bluffdale, Utah is part of domestic surveillance, intended for storage of massive amounts of data collected from a broad range of communications that could be mined readily for intelligence without warrants.

Poitras co-directed, produced, and shot her documentary, Flag Wars (2003), about gentrification in Columbus, Ohio.

It received a Peabody Award, Best Documentary at both the 2003 South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival and the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, and the Filmmaker Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

The film launched the 2003 season of the PBS TV series POV.

Poitras's other early films include O' Say Can You See... (2003) and Exact Fantasy (1995).

It was nominated for a 2004 Independent Spirit Award and a 2004 Emmy Award.

Her film My Country, My Country (2006), about life for Iraqis under U.S. occupation, was nominated for an Academy Award.

Poitras has been subject to monitoring by the U.S. Government, which she speculates is because of a wire transfer she sent in 2006 to Riyadh al-Adhadh, the Iraqi medical doctor and Sunni political candidate who was the subject of her 2006 documentary My Country, My Country.

After completing My Country, My Country, Poitras claims, "I've been placed on the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) watch list" and have been notified by airport security "that my 'threat rating' was the highest the Department of Homeland Security assigns".

She says her work has been hampered by constant harassment by border agents during more than three dozen border crossings into and out of the United States.

She has been detained for hours and interrogated and agents have seized her computer, cell phone and reporters notes and not returned them for weeks.

Once she was threatened with being refused entry back into the United States.

In response to a Glenn Greenwald article on this issue, a group of film directors began a petition to protest against the government's actions towards her.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Laura Poitras is the middle daughter of Patricia "Pat" and James "Jim" Poitras, who in 2007 donated $20 million to found The Poitras Center for Affective Disorders Research at McGovern Institute for Brain Research, part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Her parents keep a home in Massachusetts, but live mostly in Orlando, Florida.

Her sisters are Christine Poitras, an ESL teacher, and Jennifer Poitras, a disaster response planner and consultant.

Growing up, Laura planned to become a chef, and spent several years as a cook at L'Espalier, a French restaurant located in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood.

However, after finishing Sudbury Valley School, she moved to San Francisco and lost interest in becoming a chef.

Instead she studied at the San Francisco Art Institute with experimental filmmakers Ernie Gehr and Janis Crystal Lipzin.

The Oath (2010), concerns two Yemeni men caught up in America's War on Terror, won the Excellence in Cinematography Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

The two films form parts of a trilogy.

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.

On August 22, 2012, in a forum of short documentaries produced by independent filmmakers, The New York Times published an "Op-doc" produced by Poitras entitled The Program.

It was preliminary work that was to be included in a documentary planned for release as the final part of the trilogy.

The documentary was based on interviews with William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency, who became a whistleblower and described the details of the Stellar Wind project that he helped to design.

Poitras reported that on October 29, 2012 the United States Supreme Court would hear arguments regarding the constitutionality of the amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that were used to authorize the creation of such facilities and justify such actions.

In 2012, Poitras took an active part in the three-month exposition of Whitney Biennial exhibition of contemporary American art.

In April 2012, Poitras was interviewed about surveillance on Democracy Now! and called elected leaders' behavior "shameful".

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.

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.

The last third Citizenfour (2014) details how the War on Terror increasingly focuses on Americans through surveillance, covert activities, and attacks on whistleblowers.

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.

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.