James Spione is a multi-talented filmmaker, with credits as director, producer, writer, and editor of both documentary and fiction films. His notable works include the feature documentary "Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock", a collaborative project about the indigenous resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline project, which premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival and was distributed worldwide on Netflix.
Spione's previous feature, "Silenced", premiered at Tribeca in 2014 and was broadcast in several countries, including the US, France, Germany, Japan, and Canada. The film was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy Award in 2016.
In 2012, Spione was nominated for an Academy Award for his documentary "Incident in New Baghdad", a first-person account of the Baghdad airstrike that killed two Reuters journalists. The film was released on WikiLeaks in 2010, achieving worldwide notoriety.
Born in the Hudson Valley region of New York State, Spione is an alumnus of the Film Directing program at the State University of New York at Purchase. He earned a Student Academy Award for his dramatic thesis film "Prelude" in 1987 and had his film "Garden" featured in the Shorts Program at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival.
Spione's other notable works include the dramatic shorts "The Playroom" and "Garden", which starred fellow SUNY alumni Melissa Leo and Matt Malloy. He also produced and co-edited John G. Young's first feature, "Parallel Sons", which premiered at Sundance in the Dramatic Competition.
In the 2000s, Spione shifted his focus to nonfiction films, producing and directing documentaries such as "American Farm" and "Our Island Home". His ongoing longitudinal project about the Barrier Islands Center has resulted in a series of documentaries, including "Spirit of the Bird", "Watermen", "The Last Hunt Clubs", "Welcome to the Table", "Gatherings", "Island Empire", and "The Almshouse".
Spione is currently working on a documentary about the late African American photojournalist John Shearer, expected to premiere in 2024.
