[9] The NSA reporting by Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Barton Gellman contributed to the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service awarded jointly to The Guardian and The Washington Post.

The film then won a Peabody Award at the 84th ceremony in 2024 for "capturing the zeal of an artist eager to use her work to create a new vision for and of the world.

[20][21] Growing up, Laura planned to become a chef, and spent several years as a cook at L'Espalier, a French restaurant located in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood.

[24][25] Poitras co-directed, produced, and shot with Linda Goode Bryant her documentary, Flag Wars (2003), about gentrification in Columbus, Ohio.

The documentary was based on interviews with William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency, who became a whistleblower and described the details of the Stellar Wind project that he helped to design.

The Program implied that a facility being built at Bluffdale, Utah is part of domestic surveillance, intended for storage of massive amounts of data collected from a broad range of communications that could be mined readily for intelligence without warrants.

Poitras reported that on October 29, 2012 the United States Supreme Court would hear arguments regarding the constitutionality of the amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that were used to authorize the creation of such facilities and justify such actions.

[34] In response to a Glenn Greenwald article on this issue, a group of film directors began a petition to protest against the government's actions towards her.

[36][37] In January 2014, Poitras filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act[38] to learn the reason for being searched, detained and interrogated on multiple occasions.

[citation needed][45] She later worked with Jacob Appelbaum and writers and editors at Der Spiegel to cover disclosures about mass surveillance, particularly those relating to NSA activity in Germany.

[49][50] In October 2013, Poitras joined with reporters Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill to establish an on-line investigative journalism publishing venture funded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar,[51] which became First Look Media.

[54] On March 21, 2014, Poitras joined Greenwald and Barton Gellman via Skype on a panel at the Sources and Secrets Conference to discuss the legal and professional threats to journalists covering national security surveillance and whistleblower stories, like that of Edward Snowden.

Poitras was asked if she would hazard an entry into the United States and she responded that she planned to attend an April 11 event, regardless of the legal or professional threats posed by US authorities.

News reported that in 2017, after the publication of the Vault 7 files, "top intelligence officials lobbied the White House" to designate Poitras as an "information broker" to allow for more investigative tools against her, "potentially paving the way" for her prosecution.

[61] Citizenfour is a documentary about Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, who had leaked classified information about the agency's surveillance practices to the media after working in Geneva.

Poitras's solo exhibition, Astro Noise, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in February 2016, portraying immersive environments that incorporate documentary footage, architectural interventions, primary documents, and narrative structures to invite visitors to interact with the material gathered by Poitras in strikingly intimate and direct ways.

According to Variety, the film shows Assange is "willing to put everything on the line, risking imprisonment and worse to publish information he believes the public has a right to know".

[71][non-primary source needed] All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a 2022 documentary film which examines the life and career of photographer and activist Nan Goldin and her efforts to hold Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, accountable for the opioid epidemic.

[77] The film's distributor, Neon, said that the theatrical release would coincide with a retrospective of Goldin's work at the Moderna Museet, set to open October 29, 2022.