Laura Poitras is an American documentary filmmaker and journalist. She is best known for her Academy Award-winning documentary, Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden's NSA surveillance revelations. Poitras has been called one of the most important documentary filmmakers of her generation.
Poitras was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1964. She received her B.A. in studio art from Williams College in 1986 and her M.F.A. in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993. After college, she worked as a photojournalist in Mexico and Central America.
Poitras' breakthrough came in 2006 with her documentary My Country, My Country, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film followed the story of an Iraqi doctor living in Baghdad during the U.S. occupation.
In 2012, Poitras began working on a documentary about the NSA's surveillance program. In 2013, she was contacted by Edward Snowden, who provided her with a trove of documents about the agency's activities. The resulting documentary, Citizenfour, was released in 2014 and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
In addition to Citizenfour, Poitras has directed the documentaries The Oath (2010), about Guantanamo detainees, and Risk (2016), about Julian Assange. She has also produced the documentaries 1971 (2014) and Dirty Wars (2013).
In 2016, Poitras was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also been the recipient of awards from the American Civil Liberties Union, the International Documentary Association, and the International Center for Journalists.
Poitras is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and she is a member of The Guardian's US board of editors. She is also the founder of Field of Vision, an organization that produces short documentary films about global social and political issues.
Poitras is a pioneering figure in documentary filmmaking and investigative journalism. Her work has shed light on some of the most pressing issues of our time, and her artistic and journalistic commitment to telling the truth has earned her international acclaim.
