James Spione near Cannon Ball, ND during the filming of Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock.
Academy Award® and Emmy® nominee James Spione, founder of Morninglight Films, has been a documentary maker for more than two decades. His 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 fellow Oscar® nominee Josh Fox, the late indigenous filmmaker Myron Dewey, and producers Doug Good Feather and Floris White Bull. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was later acquired by Netflix.
His previous feature, the Emmy-nominated documentary about national security whistleblowers, Silenced, also streamed worldwide on Netflix, and was broadcast in the United States as well as in Europe and Asia. In addition, Mr. Spione directed the powerful war film Incident in New Baghdad, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject in 2012.
Mr. Spione’s other nonfiction films include American Farm, which detailed the decline of his family’s fifth-generation homestead in central New York State. Over the past 16 years, he has also produced and directed an ongoing series of ethnographic documentaries—Our Island Home, Spirit of the Bird, Watermen, The Last Hunt Clubs, Welcome to the Table, Gatherings, Island Empire, and The Almshouse—which explore the unique folkways and history of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, one of the few remaining rural coastal regions in the continental United States. He currently has a number of other films in various stages of development or post-production, including John Shearer: American Moments, a biopic about the late African-American photojournalist.
James Spione has also written and directed several fiction films; perhaps best-known is the eerie Sundance short Garden, a suspenseful drama starring Oscar®-winner Melissa Leo. His first film Prelude, created in the SUNY Purchase BFA Film Directing program, won a Student Academy Award and was recently digitally restored by AMPAS for inclusion in its Short Film Archive.
Mr. Spione has taught documentary in the School of Film and Media Studies at Purchase for the past ten years.