Laura Poitras is an Academy Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning filmmaker and journalist. Her last film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, premiered at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival where it won the Golden Lion for best film. The story of groundbreaking artist Nan Goldin, the film was nominated for an Academy Award and BAFTA, and won an Independent Spirit Award. Poitras’ film CITIZENFOUR won an Academy Award for Best Documentary, along with awards from BAFTA and DGA. Her journalism exposing the National Security Agency’s global mass surveillance programs received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, as well as the George Polk award for National Security Reporting.

Her Academy Award-nominated film My Country, My Country, the first film in her post-9/11 Trilogy, documented the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited her first solo show of film installations, Astro Noise, in 2016. She is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. She has also received a Peabody Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the Sundance Institute, Creative Capital, Vital Projects Fund, Cinereach, and others. In 2006, the U.S. government placed her on a terrorist watchlist and afterward detained and interrogated her dozens of times at the U.S. border.