James Spione Pro

Academy Award® nominee James Spione, founder of Morninglight Films, has been an independent filmmaker for over thirty years. His work has screened at numerous international film festivals, including Sundance, Tribeca, AFI, HotDocs, Camden, and the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, among many others. Mr. Spione’s films have been broadcast on four continents and distributed on digital platforms worldwide, including Netflix, iTunes, Amazon and Fandango at Home.

Spione’s feature Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock, about the dramatic year-long standoff between the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and North Dakota law enforcement, was an innovative collaboration with the late indigenous filmmaker Myron Dewey, fellow Oscar® nominee Josh Fox, and producers Doug Goodfeather and Floris White Bull. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was acquired by Netflix.

His previous feature about national security whistleblowers, Silenced, was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy® Award and was also picked up by Netflix, and his film Incident in New Baghdad was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Short. He is also the creator of The Eastern Shore, an ongoing documentary series filmed over 18 years, exploring the lifeways and history of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, one of the few remaining rural coastal regions in the continental United States.

Mr. Spione teaches documentary filmmaking at the State University of New York at Purchase. He currently has two films on the festival circuit: John Shearer: American Moments, a short about the late African-American photojournalist, and The Native Shore, a feature about the indigenous peoples of the Chesapeake Bay region and their struggle to reclaim their land and culture.