Barbara Kopple
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| Barbara Kopple | |||||||
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| Born | July 30, 1946 New York City, New York |
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Barbara Kopple (born July 30, 1946) is an American film director primarily known for her work in documentary film. She has won two Academy Awards; the first was in 1976, for Harlan County, USA about a Kentucky miners' strike, and the second was in 1991, for American Dream, the story of the Hormel Foods strike in Austin, Minnesota in 1985-1986.
She grew up in Scarsdale, New York, the daughter of a textile executive. She studied psychology at Northeastern University, after which she worked with the Maysles Brothers.
She has also directed episodes of the television drama series Homicide: Life on the Street and Oz.
Kopple also directed A Conversation With Gregory Peck, as well as documentaries on Mike Tyson and Woody Allen. The latter film, Wild Man Blues focuses on his Dixieland jazz tour and on Allen's relationship with Soon-Yi Previn.
Her first non-documentary feature film, Havoc, released straight to DVD in 2005, starred Anne Hathaway and Bijou Phillips as wealthy suburbanites who venture into East Los Angeles Latino gang territory.
Kopple has recently ventured into advertising work that includes documentary-style commercials for Target Stores.
She was also among the 19 filmmakers who worked together anonymously (under the rubric Winterfilm Collective) to produce the film Winter Soldier, an anti-war documentary about the Winter Soldier Investigation. She has also done films for The Working Group, directing the 30-minute short documentary "Locked Out in America: Voices From Ravenswood" for the We Do the Work series. (We Do the Work aired in the mid1990s on the "P.O.V." television series on PBS, and Kopple's segment was based on the book Ravenswood: The Steelworkers' Victory and the Revival of American Labor.)
In the fall of 2006, she released a documentary Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing about the Dixie Chicks post-Bush controversy. She is the niece of playwright, Murray Burnett.
