Barbara Kopple

Barbara Kopple (born July 30, 1946) is an American film director known primarily for her documentary work. She is credited with pioneering a renaissance of cinema vérité, and bringing the historic french style to a modern American audience. She has won two Academy Awards, for Harlan County, USA (1977), about a Kentucky miners' strike,[1] and for American Dream (1991), the story of the 1985–86 Hormel strike in Austin, Minnesota.[2] Consequently, she is the first woman to have won twice in the Oscars' Best Documentary category. Kopple will be receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences on September 28, 2023. Kopple gained acclaim for the film Bearing Witness (2005), a documentary about five women journalists stationed in combat zones during the Iraq War. She is also known for directing the documentary films Wild Man Blues (1997), A Conversation With Gregory Peck (1999), My Generation (2000), Running from Crazy (2013), Miss Sharon Jones! (2015), and Desert One (2019). She received a Primetime Emmy Award for Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson (1993). She has directed episodes of television drama series such as the NBC police drama series Homicide: Life on the Street (1999) and the HBO prison drama series Oz (1999), winning a Directors Guild of America award for the former.