She worked on a series of immersive installations for her first solo museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Laura Poitras ( / ˈ p ɔɪ t r ə s/; [3] born February 2, 1964) [4] is an American director and producer of documentary films. She has also received a Peabody Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the Sundance Institute, Creative Capital, Vital Projects Fund, Cinereach, and others. Her film Citizenfour, the third instalment of her post-9/11 Trilogy, won an Academy Award for Best Documentary, along with awards from the British Academy of Film, Independent Spirit Awards, Director’s Guild of America, and Emmy Awards. Instead she studied at the San Francisco Art Institute with experimental filmmakers Ernie Gehr [21] and Janis Crystal Lipzin.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. 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. In 2014, Poitras told the Associated Press she was editing the film in Berlin because she feared her source material would be seized by the government inside the U. The lawyers also scrutinize the way in which Poitras changed the film after its premiere in 2016 as well as other critical aspects.

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. With Laura Poitras' re-cut 'Risk,' a director controversially changes her mind about Julian Assange". We are very excited to welcome everyone to The Intercept, a publication of First Look Media (FLM). Laura Poitras' All the Beauty and the Bloodshed Tapped as New York Film Festival Centerpiece Selection". 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.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. However, after finishing Sudbury Valley School, she moved to San Francisco and lost interest in becoming a chef. The film, about the 1971 Media, Pennsylvania raid of FBI offices, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 18, 2014. In response to a Glenn Greenwald article on this issue, a group of film directors began a petition to protest against the government's actions towards her. She is a founding board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, on the advisory board of Forensic Architecture, and a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences.

Her sisters are Christine Poitras, an ESL teacher, and Jennifer Poitras, a disaster response planner and consultant.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. In 2013, Poitras was one of the initial three journalists to meet Edward Snowden in Hong Kong and to receive copies of leaked NSA documents. Omidyar's "concern about press freedoms in the US and around the world" sparked the idea for the new media outlet.