[4] He first achieved national recognition in 1987, when he received a Student Academy Award for his dramatic thesis film Prelude, about an adolescent boy's solo journey into the Adirondack Mountains.
[6] During the 1990s, Spione wrote and directed several other notable dramatic shorts, including Garden (1994), which starred fellow SUNY alumni Melissa Leo and Matt Malloy.
[7] Spione next wrote and directed The Playroom (1996), starring Pamela Holden Stewart, which was shown at the Walter Reade Theatre in New York City as part of the "Independents Night" series and broadcast on the national cable program "Reel Street.
[10] Spione often toured with the movie and would hold frequent Q&A sessions at each regional premiere to engage the audience directly in discussions about the state of family farming in America.
Over the ensuing years, Spione has returned to the area numerous times, working with the Center to create a series of shorts about the unique history and culture of the region, including "Spirit of the Bird" (2012), "Watermen" (2014), "The Last Hunt Clubs" (2016), "Welcome to the Table" (2018), "Gatherings" (2020), "Island Empire: The Story of the Cobbs" (2022) and "The Almshouse" (2024).
[14] The director next completed a feature documentary called Silenced, about the Obama Administration's crackdown on U.S. national security whistleblowers including Thomas Andrews Drake and John Kiriakou.
[16] Silenced was broadcast nationally on the DirecTV Audience Channel in 2015, streamed worldwide on Netflix, and was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy Award in the Outstanding Informational Long-Form Program category.