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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. Known for her "fly-on-the-wall" filmmaking style, Kopple captured raw, real-life events without interrupting the action. She has won two Academy Awards, for Harlan County, USA (1976), about a Kentucky miners' strike, and for American Dream (1990), the story of the 1985–86 Hormel strike in Austin, Minnesota, making her the first woman to win two Oscars in the Best Documentary category.
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), and 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.
Kopple received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences on September 28, 2023.
Kopple was born in New York City, and grew up on a vegetable farm in Scarsdale, New York, the daughter of a textile executive.
Her uncle, Murray Burnett, was a co-author of Everybody Comes to Rick's, an unproduced play, that was the basis for the film, Casablanca. Her mother and maternal grandparents grew up in Peekskill, New York, the latter of whom publicly criticized the attempted censorship of singer Paul Robeson in 1949.
At Northeastern University, she studied political science and clinical psychology, and for a clinical psychology course, she made her first film, "Winter Soldiers," about Vietnam veterans, instead of writing a term paper. While working among lobotomy patients at Medfield State Hospital with Northeastern University, she decided she wanted to be a filmmaker instead.
"I realized when I was studying psychology that nobody would probably ever read what I wrote"
— Barbara Kopple
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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. Known for her "fly-on-the-wall" filmmaking style, Kopple captured raw, real-life events without interrupting the action. She has won two Academy Awards, for Harlan County, USA (1976), about a Kentucky miners' strike, and for American Dream (1990), the story of the 1985–86 Hormel strike in Austin, Minnesota, making her the first woman to win two Oscars in the Best Documentary category.
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), and 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.
Kopple received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences on September 28, 2023.
Kopple was born in New York City, and grew up on a vegetable farm in Scarsdale, New York, the daughter of a textile executive.
Her uncle, Murray Burnett, was a co-author of Everybody Comes to Rick's, an unproduced play, that was the basis for the film, Casablanca. Her mother and maternal grandparents grew up in Peekskill, New York, the latter of whom publicly criticized the attempted censorship of singer Paul Robeson in 1949.
At Northeastern University, she studied political science and clinical psychology, and for a clinical psychology course, she made her first film, "Winter Soldiers," about Vietnam veterans, instead of writing a term paper. While working among lobotomy patients at Medfield State Hospital with Northeastern University, she decided she wanted to be a filmmaker instead.
"I realized when I was studying psychology that nobody would probably ever read what I wrote"
— Barbara Kopple