DOC NYC Visionaries Tribute

Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson

Emmy, Guggenheim, and Sundance award-winning duo Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson co-founded Rada Studio to balance their family life with their passion for the arts. Together, they have built an impressive portfolio of fiction films, documentaries, immersive XR installations, and books. Through a Black Atlantic lens, they reimagine narratives of resistance and healing, weaving fiction, immersive, experimental, and hybrid forms that center a Black Radical tradition and the lived experiences of the Black diaspora exemplified by their genre bending works: Changing Same XR, Black Girls Play: The Story of Hand Games, The Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, and more recently True North, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Lois Vossen

Lois Vossen, founding executive producer of Independent Lens on PBS and YouTube, leads the programming of 25-30 original documentary projects made by independent filmmakers each season. Independent Lens documentaries including I Am Not Your Negro, Philly DA, Newtown, Tower, and The Invisible War build empathy and empower people to better understand themselves and each other. Awarded Best Series by the International Documentary Association (IDA) six times, Independent Lens has received 11 Academy Award nominations and 75 Emmy, Peabody, and duPont–Columbia University Awards. Vossen was inducted into the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) Silver Circle, and honored as Nonprofit Leader of the Year by the Anthem Awards.

Alan Berliner

Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Alan Berliner is a virtuoso of essayistic documentary. His films are characterized by a first person perspective, playful use of archive materials, and inventive editing and sound design. His works include Letter to the Editor, an eclectic meditation on newspaper photography that played at DOC NYC; First Cousin, Once Removed, on a poet’s experience with Alzheimer’s disease, that was on the DOC NYC and Oscar short lists; Wide Awake about the director’s experiences with insomnia; The Sweetest Sound interviewing other people with the name Alan Berliner; Nobody’s Business profiling his father; Intimate Stranger profiling his maternal grandfather; and Family Album, a cinematic collage drawn from home movies.

Marcia Smith

Emmy Award-nominated filmmaker Marcia Smith is president and co-founder of Firelight Media, a nonprofit organization that supports, resources, and advocates on behalf of documentary filmmakers of color. Over the past 25 years, Firelight Media’s artist programs have supported more than 250 filmmakers, who have premiered their films at esteemed festivals and gone on to earn numerous awards. Smith has written several films alongside filmmaker Stanley Nelson including Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom; Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities; Through the Fire: The Legacy of Barack Obama; Freedom Riders; Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple; Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind; and The Murder of Emmett Till.

Michael Moore

Michael Moore launched his documentary career with Roger & Me in 1989. He went on to break the documentary box office record with his 2002 Oscar-winning film Bowling for Columbine and the Palme d’Or-winning Fahrenheit 9/11, which remains the highest-grossing documentary of all time. His other notable films include the Oscar-nominated Sicko, Capitalism: A Love Story, Where to Invade Next, and Fahrenheit 11/9. He won the Emmy Award for his prime-time NBC series TV Nation and is one of America’s top-selling nonfiction authors, with such books as Stupid White Men; Dude, Where’s My Country? and Here Comes Trouble. He is the host of the podcast Rumble with Michael Moore.

Deborah Shaffer

Deborah Shaffer began making social issue documentaries as a member of the Newsreel collective in the 1970s. Her first feature documentary, The Wobblies, was recently added to the National Film Registry. Her directing credits include Witness to War: Dr. Charlie Clements, which won the Academy Award for Short Documentary; as well as the features Fire From the Mountain; Dance of Hope; From the Ashes: 10 Artists; and Queen of Hearts: Audrey Flack. She co-directed and produced To Be Heard, which won awards at numerous festivals, including the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize at the inaugural DOC NYC.

Geralyn White Dreyfous

Geralyn White Dreyfous has over 180 credits as a producer and executive producer of documentary films. Those credits include Born Into Brothels; The Invisible War; 16 Shots; The Hunting Ground; Won’t You Be My Neighbor?; The Great Hack; Us Kids; The Truffle Hunters; Mija; Aftershock; and The Grab. She stands as Founder and Board Chair of Utah Film Center, Co-Founder of Impact Partners, and a founding member of Gamechanger Films. She spent an early part of her career at the Philanthropic Initiative in Boston and taught Documentary and Narrative writing with Dr. Robert Coles at Harvard University.

Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog was born in Munich on September 5, 1942. He grew up in a remote mountain village in Bavaria and studied History and German Literature in Munich and Pittsburgh. He made his first film in 1961 at the age of 19. Since then he has produced, written, and directed more than sixty feature- and documentary films including Lessons in Darkness; Little Dieter Needs to Fly; My Best Fiend; Grizzly Man; and Encounters at the End of the World. His film Cave of Forgotten Dreams was the opening night film of the first DOC NYC festival in 2010. His most recent documentaries are Theater of Thought and The Fire Within.

Joan Churchill

Joan Churchill has a distinguished documentary career. She began her career as a cameraperson on films such as Gimme Shelter; Hail, Hail Rock and Roll and Jimi Plays Berkeley. She is a long-time collaborator with Nick Broomfield with directing credits on Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer; Soldier Girls and Juvenile Liaison. Among her many credits as a cinematographer are the documentaries Last Days in Vietnam, Shut Up & Sing and Down from the Mountain. She is the first documentary-focused director of photography to be accepted into the American Society of Cinematographers (A.S.C.) and one of the few women.

Raoul Peck

Raoul Peck was born in Haiti and educated in Congo, Brooklyn and France. His credits as a documentary director include Lumumba, Death of a Prophet; Fatal Assistance; the Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro; and the four-part HBO Documentary Films’ groundbreaking series Exterminate all the Brutes. His directing credits in fiction films include Lumumba; Sometimes in April; Moloch Tropical; and The Young Karl Marx. His complex career includes an 18-month stint as Haiti’s Minister of Culture, two years teaching at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and nine years as the President of the French national film school La Fémis in Paris.

Jean Tsien

2020 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Jean Tsien is a veteran documentary editor, producer, and story consultant. In 2020, she served as a producer on 76 Days and an executive producer on the series Asian Americans. Her editing credits include: Something Within Me, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, Malcolm X: Make It Plain, Solar Mamas, Please Vote For Me, Dixie Chicks: Shut Up & Sing, Miss Sharon Jones! and The Apollo. Her credits as an executive producer include Plastic China, Please Remember Me, People’s Republic of Desire, and Our Time Machine. Born in Taiwan, she is based in New York City.

Sam Pollard

2020 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Sam Pollard is an Emmy Award-winning and Oscar-nominated director and producer whose latest film is MLK/FBI. His past work includes the documentaries Four Little Girls, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Slavery by Another Name, Sammy Davis, Jr.: I Gotta Be Me, ACORN and the Firestorm, Why We Hate, and Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children. Pollard also directed two episodes of the groundbreaking series Eyes on the Prize II. Since 1994 Pollard has served on the faculty of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Martin Scorsese

2019 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Martin Scorsese has interwoven documentary making throughout his distinguished career. His latest nonfiction work is Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story. Among his other acclaimed nonfiction films are The 50 Year Argument; George Harrison: Living in the Material World; No Direction Home: Bob Dylan; The Blues; My Voyage to Italy; The Last Waltz; A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies; Public Speaking; and Italianamerican. His latest project is the narrative feature The Irishman. [Biography from 2019]

Michael Apted

2019 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Michael Apted is the director of the ground-breaking 7 Up series, a study of the British class system that brings forth a new film every seven years. The latest film in his series, 63 Up, presented by BritBox, will be released in fall 2019. His other documentaries include Married in America; Me & Isaac Newton; Moving the Mountain; Inspirations; Incident at Oglala; and Bring on the Night. [Biography from 2019]

Orlando Bagwell

2018 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Orlando Bagwell’s directing credits include Citizen King, A Hymn for Alvin Ailey, Malcolm X: Make It Plain, and two episodes in the landmark Eyes on the Prize series. Serving as a program officer at the Ford Foundation for nearly a decade, Bagwell established the $50 million JustFilms fund. He is currently finishing a documentary on Gil Scott-Heron. [Biography from 2018]

Wim Wenders

2018 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Wim Wenders directed the Oscar-nominated documentaries The Salt of the Earth, Pina and Buena Vista Social Club, along with nonfiction titles such as The Blues and Room 666 and celebrated fiction films such as Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire. His latest documentary is Pope Francis: A Man of His Word. [Biography from 2018]

Sheila Nevins

2017 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Sheila Nevins is President of HBO Documentary Films and has overseen documentaries for the channel for over 30 years. She has supervised the production of over 1,000 documentary programs for HBO. As an executive producer or producer, she has received 32 Primetime Emmy Awards, 34 News and Documentary Emmys, and 42 George Foster Peabody Awards. During her tenure, HBO’s documentaries have gone on to win 26 Academy Awards. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling book You Don’t Look Your Age… and Other Fairy Tales. [Biography from 2017]

Errol Morris

2017 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Errol Morris has been a continuous innovator in the documentary form with films such as The B-Side, Gates of Heaven; Vernon, Florida; The Thin Blue Line; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control; Mr. Death; the Oscar-winning The Fog of War; and Standard Operating Procedure and the Netflix series Wormwood. His film Tabloid was the Closing Night Film of DOC NYC’s first year in 2010; and The Unknown Known was the Opening Night film of the 2013 festival. [Biography from 2017]

Stanley Nelson

2016 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Stanley Nelson is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, MacArthur “genius” Fellow, member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and has multiple industry awards to his credit. Nelson is the director of documentary features including Freedom Riders, Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple and The Murder of Emmett Till. He is also co-founder of Firelight Media, a non-profit organization that provides technical education, funding and professional support to emerging documentarians. [Biography from 2016]

Jonathan Demme

2016 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Jonathan Demme began his career as a writer and producer with Roger Corman in 1971 and has directed and produced more than 40 movies since. His films have been nominated for 20 Academy Awards, including Beloved, Melvin and Howard, Philadelphia, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Who Am I This Time?, Rachel Getting Married, The Manchurian Candidate, and Silence of the Lambs, for which he won the Oscar for Best Director in 1991. His documentaries and performance films include Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids, Cousin Bobby, The Agronomist, Haiti Dreams of Democracy, Stop Making Sense, Swimming to Cambodia, Neil Young Heart of Gold, Neil Young Trunk Show, Neil Young Journeys, Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains, I’m Carolyn Parker, The Good the Mad and the Beautiful, New Home Moves from the Lower 9th Ward, Tavis Smiley’s Been In the Storm Too Long and Enzo Avitabile Music Life. [Biography from 2016]

Jon Alpert

2015 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Jon Alpert co-founded New York’s Downtown Community Television (DCTV), the country’s oldest non-profit community media center. He is the winner of 16 Emmy Awards and the recipient of four DuPont-Columbia Awards; his documentaries include One Year in the Life of Crime, Baghdad ER, and the Oscar-nominated shorts China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province and Redemption. Alpert’s latest film is Mariela Castro’s March: Cuba’s LGBT Revolution. [Biography from 2015]

Barbara Kopple

2015 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Barbara Kopple is a two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker, having won for both Harlan County USA and American Dream. In 1991, Harlan County USA was named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Kopple’s other celebrated films include Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson, Wild Man Blues, Shut Up & Sing, Running From Crazy, A Conversation With Gregory Peck, Hot Type: 150 Years of The Nation, and her latest, Miss Sharon Jones! [Biography from 2015]

Frederick Wiseman

2015 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Frederick Wiseman is a pioneer of observational documentary filmmaking, starting with his acclaimed 1967 debut Titicut Follies. He is the recipient of the George Polk Career Award and the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion, among many honors. Wiseman has directed dozens of films, from early classics such as High School and Law and Order to recent works La Danse, Boxing Gym, Crazy Horse, At Berkeley, National Gallery, and his latest, In Jackson Heights. [Biography from 2015]

D.A. Pennebaker

2014 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Chris Hegedus

2014 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Albert Maysles

2014 Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award

Past Winners

Past Winners

Past Winners