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Laura Poitras (; born February 2, 1964) Video interview. Pronunciation confirmed at beginning of video. 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.
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. 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.
Her film My Country, My Country (2006), about life for Iraqis under U.S. occupation, was nominated for an Academy Award. 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. The last third Citizenfour (2014) details how the war on terror increasingly focuses on Americans through surveillance, covert activities, and attacks on .
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.Poitras, Laura, The Program, New York Times Op-Docs, August 22, 2012 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. 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 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.
Poitras helped to produce stories exposing previously secret U.S. intelligence activities, which earned her the 2013 Polk award and contributed to the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service awarded jointly to The Guardian and The Washington Post. She later worked with Jacob Appelbaum and writers and editors at Der Spiegel to cover disclosures about mass surveillance, particularly those relating to NSA activity in Germany.John Lubbock (October 2013), Jacob Appelbaum's Utopia Embassy Espionage: The NSA's Secret Spy Hub in Berlin Der Spiegel October 27, 2013 She later revealed in her documentary Risk that she had a brief romantic relationship with Appelbaum.Zeitchik, Stephen. Perspective With Laura Poitras' re-cut 'Risk,' a director controversially changes her mind about Julian Assange, Los Angeles Times. May 6, 2017.
She filmed, edited, and produced Channel 4's alternative to the Royal Christmas Message by Queen Elizabeth II in 2013, the "Alternative Christmas Message", featuring Edward Snowden.
In October 2013, Poitras joined with reporters Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill to establish an on-line investigative journalism publishing venture funded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, '"There is a War on Journalism": on NSA Leaks & New Investigative Reporting Venture', Democracy Now!, December 5, 2013. Retrieved December 30, 2013. which became First Look Media. Omidyar's "concern about press freedoms in the US and around the world" sparked the idea for the new media outlet. 'Pierre Omidyar commits $250m to new media venture with Glenn Greenwald', The Guardian, October 16, 2013. Retrieved January 3, 2014. The first publication from that group, a digital magazine called The Intercept, launched on February 10, 2014. Poitras stood down from her editorial role in September 2016 to focus on Field of Vision, a First Look Media project focused on non-fiction .
On March 21, 2014, Poitras joined Greenwald and Barton Gellman via Skype on a panel at the Sources and Secrets Conference to discuss the legal and professional threats to journalists covering national security surveillance and whistleblower stories, like that of Edward Snowden. Poitras was asked if she would hazard an entry into the United States and she responded that she planned to attend an April 11 event, regardless of the legal or professional threats posed by US authorities. Poitras and Greenwald returned to the US to receive their awards unimpeded.
In May 2014, Poitras was reunited with Snowden in Moscow along with Greenwald.
In September 2021, Yahoo! News reported that in 2017, after the publication of the Vault 7 files, "top intelligence officials lobbied the White House" to designate Poitras as an "information broker" to allow for more investigative tools against her, "potentially paving the way" for her prosecution. However, the White House rejected this idea. Poitras told Yahoo! News that such attempts were "bone-chilling and a threat to journalists worldwide."
In an interview with The Washington Post about Citizenfour shortly before the film's release, Poitras said that she considered herself to be the narrator of the film but made a choice not to be seen on camera:
"I come from a filmmaking tradition where I'm using the camera—it's my lens to express the filmmaking I do. In the same way that a writer uses their language, for me it's the images that tell the story ... the camera is my tool for documenting things, so I stay mostly behind it."Citizenfour won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature of 2014.
Poitras is portrayed by actress Melissa Leo in the biographical drama film Snowden (2016), directed by Oliver Stone, and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Snowden.
Poitras and others described Assange's statements about women as "troubling". Assange alleges in the film that he is the victim of a radical feminist conspiracy over his being wanted for questioning on sexual assault allegations by the Swedish authorities. In the film, he argues that one of the women in question had potentially alternate motivation because she founded Gothenburg’s largest lesbian nightclub. According to Poitras, Assange disapproved of the film because it included scenes showing his "troubling relationship with women".
In May 2017, WikiLeaks' four lawyers publicly wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek stating that the film serves to undermine WikiLeaks at a time when the Trump administration announced that it intends to prosecute journalists, editors and associates of WikiLeaks. The lawyers also scrutinize the way in which Poitras changed the film after its premiere in 2016 as well as other critical aspects.
The film premiered on September 3, 2022, at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, where it was awarded the Golden Lion making it the second documentary (following Sacro GRA in 2013) to win the top prize at Venice. It also will screen at the 2022 New York Film Festival, where it will be the festival's centerpiece film and the official poster will be designed by Goldin. The film's distributor, Neon, said that the theatrical release would coincide with a retrospective of Goldin's work at the Moderna Museet, set to open October 29, 2022. The documentary became a Peabody Award winner in June 2024 at the 84th awards ceremony.
Cover-Up (2025)
In 2025, Poitras co-directed and produced alongside Mark Obenhaus, Cover-Up focusing on the journalism by Seymour Hersh. It had its world premiere out of competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival and also screened as part of the Main Slate at the 2025 New York Film Festival.
Selected awards and honours
Selected filmography
External links
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