- Michael Moore
Michael Francis Moore (born April 23 1954) is an Academy Award-winning American director and producer of "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Bowling for Columbine", two of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. He is a vocal critic of globalization, large corporations, gun violence, the Iraq War, U.S. President George W. Bush and the American health care system. In 2005 Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people.
- Ken Burns
Kenneth Lauren Burns (b. July 29, 1953) is an American director and producer of documentary films known for his style of making use of original prints and photographs. Among his most notable productions are the 1990 film, "The Civil War", the 1994 film, "Baseball", and the 2001 film, "JAZZ".
- Errol Morris
Since the premiere of his groundbreaking 1978 film, "Gates of Heaven," Errol Morris has indelibly altered our perception of the non-fiction film, presenting to audiences the mundane, bizarre and history-making with his own distinctive elan. ... Recently, Morris was highly praised for his short film that ran at the front of the 2002 Academy Awards, where he asked an admixture of anonymous and well-known people outside the movie business to talk about what they love about movies.
- Morgan Spurlock
Morgan V. Spurlock (born November 7, 1970) is an American independent documentary film director, TV producer, and screenwriter, known for the documentary film "Super Size Me", in which he attempted to demonstrate the negative health effects of McDonald's food by eating nothing but McDonalds three times a day, every day, for one month. Spurlock is also the executive producer and star of the reality television series "30 Days".
- Martin Scorsese
Martin Marcantonio Luciano Scorsese (born November 17, 1942) is an American film director, writer and producer and founder of the World Cinema Foundation. He is also a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema and has won an Academy Award as well as awards from the Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Directors Guild of America. Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian American identity, …
- Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog is a German film director, screenwriter, actor, and opera director. He is often associated with the German New Wave movement (also called New German Cinema), along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders and others. His films often feature heroes with impossible dreams or people with unique talents in obscure fields.
- Rory Kennedy
Rory Elizabeth Katherine Kennedy (born December 12, 1968) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and producer. She is the youngest of the eleven children of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy. Kennedy married Mark Bailey on August 2, 1999. They have three children: Georgia Elizabeth Kennedy-Bailey, born in September 2002; Bridget Katherine Kennedy-Bailey, born in July 2004; and Zachary Corkland Kennedy-Bailey born in July 16, 2007 at 9:47 am, …
- Barbara Kopple
Barbara Kopple (born July 30, 1946) is an American film director primarily known for her work in documentary film. She has won two Academy Awards; the first was in 1976, for "Harlan County, USA" about a Kentucky miners' strike, and the second was in 1991, for "American Dream," the story of the Hormel Foods strike in Austin, Minnesota in 1985-1986.
- D. A. Pennebaker
Donn Alan "D. A." Pennebaker is an American documentary filmmaker and one of the pioneers of Direct Cinema/Cinéma vérité. Performing arts (especially pop music) and politics are his primary subjects. In the early 1960s Pennebaker (known as "Penny" to his friends), together with Richard Leacock and Robert Drew, founded Drew Associates. In 1963 Leacock and Pennebaker left to found their own production firm. Later he often worked with his wife, Chris Hegedus.
- Jehane Noujaim
Jehane Noujaim began her career as a photographer and filmmaker in Cairo, Egypt. She attended Harvard University and was awarded the Gardiner Fellowship. She then joined the MTV news and documentary division as a producer for the series Unfiltered. Noujaim left her producing job at MTV to produce and direct Startup.Com, which played as part of Sundance's documentary competition in 2001.
- Frederick Wiseman
Frederick Wiseman (born 1 January 1930 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA) is an American documentary filmmaker. Born into a Jewish family, he came to documentary filmmaking after first being trained as a lawyer, a fact that has influenced his style and choice of subjects ever since. In 2003, Frederick Wiseman received the George Polk Career Award given annually by Long Island University to honor contributions to journalistic integrity and investigative reporting.
- Nick Broomfield
Nicholas Broomfield (born 30 January 1948, in London) is an English documentary filmmaker. He studied Law at Cardiff, Wales, and Political Science at the University of Essex; subsequently, he studied film at the National Film and Television School. Broomfield films with a minimum of crew: just himself and one or two camera operators. Broomfield's minimal crew gives his documentaries a distinctive style; Broomfield himself is often in shot holding the sound boom.
- Ron Mann
Ronald "Ron" Mann (b. June 13, 1958) is a Canadian documentary film director focusing primarily on aspects of American popular culture. He is a Graduate of the University of Toronto. His films include "Imagine the Sound", "Comic Book Confidential", "The Twist", "Grass", "Go Further", and his latest release "Tales Of The Rat Fink". He also directed "Poetry in Motion", released on Giorno Poetry Systems.
- Les Blank
Les Blank (b. 1935, Tampa, Florida, United States) is an American documentary filmmaker best known for his portraits of American traditional musicians. Blank attended Tulane University in New Orleans, where he received a B.A. in English literature and an M.F.A. in theater. Following his university education he founded his own production company, Flower Films, and all of his films since that time have been independently produced, …
- Kirby Dick
Kirby Dick is a documentary film director. He is an alumnus of the Program in Film and Video Program at California Institute of the Arts. In 1997, Dick co-founded Chain Camera Pictures, the production company on each of his documentary films.
- Ric Burns
Eric D. Burns is a documentary filmmaker and writer. Burns has been writing, directing and producing historical documentaries for nearly 20 years, since his collaboration on the celebrated PBS series "The Civil War", (1990), which he produced with his brother Ken Burns, and wrote with Geoffrey C. Ward. Since founding Steeplechase Films in 1989, he has directed several programs for WGBH Boston's American Experience, including "Coney Island" (1991).
- Leni Riefenstahl
Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl was a German film director, dancer and actress, and widely noted for her aesthetics and advances in film technique. Her most famous film was "Triumph des Willens", a documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg congress of the Nazi Party, which was used by the Third Reich as a powerful propaganda film. Because of Riefenstahl's social prominence in the Third Reich, including a personal acquaintance with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, …
- Simcha Jacobovici
Simcha Jacobovici is an award winning and controversial documentary director and producer whose work deals primarily with controversies in Jewish history. He co-authored with Charles R. Pellegrino the highly controversial "The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History" (2007), a companion book to the Discovery Channel documentary about the unearthing of the alleged tomb of Jesus Christ.
- Aj Schnack
AJ Schnack is an independent filmmaker. He directed "Kurt Cobain About a Son", which premiered at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. His first feature film was a documentary about the Brooklyn-based band They Might Be Giants titled "Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)"
- Eugene Jarecki
Eugene Jarecki is an award-winning dramatic and documentary filmmaker based in New York. His works include "Why We Fight" which won the 2005 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, "The Trials of Henry Kissinger", "Quest of the Carib Canoe" and "Season of the Lifterbees". He is the brother of filmmaker Andrew Jarecki. He attended Princeton and New York University. After working for some years as a director of stage plays, …
- James Longley
James Longley is the maker of the documentary, "Gaza Strip", released in 2002. His latest production, "Iraq in Fragments", presents a view of Iraq and Iraqis during the first two years of Iraq war. It was awarded three jury awards at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. His short film "Sari's Mother" premiered at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. "Iraq in Fragments" has been nominated for an Academy Award for Documentary Feature.
- Kevin MacDonald
Kevin Macdonald (born October 28, 1967) is a Scottish two-time BAFTA winning director. Most famous for his films The Last King of Scotland and Touching The Void. Macdonald was born in Glasgow, Scotland, the grandson of the Hungarian-born English filmmaker Emeric Pressburger, and educated at Glenalmond College. He began his career with a biography of his grandfather, "The Life and Death of a Screenwriter" (1994), …
- Avi Lewis
Avi Lewis is documentary filmmaker, and is the son of two famous Canadians — Stephen Lewis (UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa) and Michele Landsberg (journalist). Lewis grew up in Melbourne — attending Leibler Yavneh College (an elite Australian private school), Jarvis Collegiate Institute (a public secondary school), and Upper Canada College. Between 1996 and 1998, Avi Lewis was host of "The NewMusic", a music magazine show on MuchMusic and CityTV.
- John Grierson
John Grierson (26 April 1898 - 19 February 1972) is often considered the father of British and Canadian documentary film.
- Ross McElwee
Ross McElwee (born July 21 1947) is an American documentary filmmaker and cinematographer, and Harvard professor, known for his autobiographical films about his family and personal life, usually interwoven with an episodic journey of some sort. McElwee is a 1970 graduate of Brown University. He received the Career Award at the 2007 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.
- Anand Patwardhan
Anand Patwardhan (b. 1950) is a documentary filmmaker from India. He studied at the Cathedral and John Connon School, completed a B.A. in English literature at Bombay University in 1970, a B.A. in Sociology at Brandeis University in 1970, and an M.A. in Communications at McGill University in 1982.
- Alexandra Pelosi
Alexandra Pelosi (born 1970) is a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and writer based in New York City. She is the daughter of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and, like her mother, is a Democrat. In 2000, Pelosi worked as a network television producer for NBC covering George W. Bush's presidential campaign. She brought along a handheld camcorder documenting her experience on the campaign trail; the footage was used to create "Journeys with George", …
- Steven Okazaki
Steven Okazaki (born 1952 in Venice, California) is an American filmmaker. He is Sansei Japanese American (3rd generation) and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has received a Peabody Award and been nominated for three Academy Awards, winning an Oscar for the documentary short subject, "Days of Waiting: The Life & Art of Estelle Ishigo" (1990).
- Pierre Rehov
Pierre Rehov (1952-) is the pseudonym of a French Jewish film maker, most known for his movies which are almost exclusively based on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Rehov was born to a Jewish family in Algeria, where he experienced terrorism at a young age. In 1961 his family moved to France with as many as 250,000 other French fleeing Algeria, which was to become independent the next year.
- Joe Berlinger
Joseph "Joe" Berlinger (b. October 30 1961) is a documentary film-maker who, in collaboration with Bruce Sinofsky, has created such films as "Paradise Lost" about the West Memphis 3, "Brother's Keeper", and "Some Kind of Monster". In collaboration with journalist Greg Milner, Berlinger has also written a book called "Metallica: This Monster Lives", …
- Jessica Yu
Jessica Lingman Yu (born 1966) is an American film director, writer, producer, and editor. A Yale University graduate, she has worked in both documentaries and dramatic films. She won an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject for "Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien" (1996). She, her husband Mark Salzman, and their daughter Ava live in Los Angeles.
- Joris Ivens
Joris Ivens (November 18 1898-June 28 1989) was a Dutch documentary filmmaker and devout communist. He is generally respected as one of the foremost documentarists of the twentieth century but is critisized for his support for communists dictators like Joseph Stalin. Probably the best known of his early films is his 10-minute short "Rain" "(Regen)".
- Saul Landau
Saul Landau was Director of Digital Media Programs and Hugh O. Bounty Chair of Applied Interdisciplinary Knowledge at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona). He now teaches at American University. He is noted internationally for his films and writing on domestic policy and cultural issues. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 1980 Emmy. He is a longtime commentator on Pacifica Radio.
- Arthur Dong
Arthur Dong (born October 30, 1953 in San Francisco, California) is an American documentary filmmaker. He is Chinese American and his work combines the art of the visual medium with an investigation of social issues, examing topics such as Asian American history and identity, and Gay oppression.
- Richard Leacock
Richard Leacock (born 18 July 1921, London) is a documentary film director and one of the pioneers of Direct Cinema. Leacock (known to his friends as "Ricky") grew up on a banana plantation in the Canary Islands (the Leacock family, though English, have long been involved in the production of Madeira wine and bananas in the Spanish and Portuguese islands), until shipped off to School in England. He attended Bedales School, then Dartington Hall School from 1929 to 1938, …
- Aaron Russo
Aaron Russo is an entertainment businessman, film maker, and libertarian political activist.
- Emile de Antonio
Emile de Antonio (1919-December 16, 1989) was a director and producer of documentary films, usually detailing political or social events circa 1960s - 1980s. He was born in 1919 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He attended Harvard with John F. Kennedy and would later go on to make a film about Kennedy's assassination called "Rush to Judgment". After serving in the military during World War II, de Antonio frequented the art crowd, …
- Alanis Obomsawin
Alanis Obomsawin : Filmmaking with a focus on social justice Alanis Obomsawin (photo: National Film Board of Canada)Reference: Publication of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts 2001
- Michael Tucker
Michael Tucker, an American documentary film director, was born in Seattle, Washington. He is currently best known for his recent documentary "The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair". He also directed a documentary in Iraq during the 2003 Iraqi War entitled "Gunner Palace".
- Kim Longinotto
Kim Longinotto is a British documentary maker, most famous for making films which highlight the plight of female victims of oppression or discrimination. Kim is romantically connected to Tony Graham, director of the Unicorn Children's theatre in London.