For the past 50 years, Barbara Kopple has dedicated her prolific career to directing and producing powerful, emotionally affecting films about important political issues – including labor rights, freedom of speech, transgender acceptance, and anti-war advocacy. She is the two-time Academy Award winning director of Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) and American Dream (1990). In 1991, Harlan County, U.S.A. was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress and designated as an American Film Classic; the film was restored and preserved by the Women’s Preservation Fund in partnership with the Academy Film Archive. In 2005, Harlan County, U.S.A. was featured as part of the Sundance Collection at the Sundance Film Festival, and in 2006 the Criterion Collection released a DVD. The film is currently streaming on Criterion Channel and on HBOMAX. Barbara founded the New York-based production company Cabin Creek Films in 1972.

Across television and documentary film, Barbara has been nominated for a total of nine Primetime Emmy Awards. She most recently completed the documentary Gumbo Coalition (2022) for HBO Max, about national social justice leaders Marc Morial and Janet Murguía; the film had its World Premiere at DOC NYC, as the festival’s Centerpiece film, and its European premiere at IDFA. Previously, she also directed Desert One (2019), about the daring and ill-fated US Special Ops mission in the midst of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, which is currently available to stream on HISTORY. New Homeland (2018), a film which documented the experiences of refugee children from Syria and Iraq at a summer camp in the Canadian wilderness; A Murder In Mansfield (2017) examined the murder trial in the nineties, where a son testified against his father for the murder of his mother. Other recent films include This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous (2017), Miss Sharon Jones! (2015), Hot Type: 150 Years of The Nation (2013), and Running from Crazy (2013). Her films have frequently premiered at such film festivals as Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and DOC NYC. Barbara has additionally directed episodes of HBO’s Oz and NBC’s Homicide, the latter for which she won a DGA Award, as well as commercial spots for companies such as American Greetings, Sprint, Applebee’s, Dove, Intel, Target, the Tiger Woods Foundation, Pearl Vision and the Children’s Defense Fund. Her sole feature fiction film, Havoc (2005), starred up-and-coming star Anne Hathaway as a wealthy teenager coming of age and searching for identity in Los Angeles.

Barbara has been awarded the Human Rights Watch Film Festival Irene Diamond Award, the Los Angeles Film Critics Award, the National Society of Film Critics Award, the SilverDocs/Charles Guggenheim Award, the New York Women in Film & Television Muse Award, the Maya Deren Independent Film and Video Award, the Woodstock Film Festival Maverick Award, Women in Film & Video of Washington, DC Women of Vision Award, the White House Project’s EPIC Award, the International Documentary Association Career Achievement Award, the San Francisco Film Society’s Persistence of Vision Award, the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, the Sarasota Film Festival Director’s Award, and the Nantucket Film Festival’s Special Achievement in Documentary Filmmaking Award. The Paley Center for Media named Barbara a 2007 “She Made It” honoree, and she recently served her tenth year on the Board of Trustees for the American Film Institute. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Director’s Guild of America, New York Women in Film and Television’s Honorary Board, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Barbara is passionate about actively contributing to organizations that support independent filmmaking.