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James Spione, an Academy Award and Emmy nominee, is a filmmaker specializing in directing, producing, writing, and editing both documentary and fiction films. His feature documentary, "Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock," presents a collaborative narrative of the historic indigenous resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline near Cannon Ball, North Dakota. The project was created alongside director Josh Fox, the late native filmmaker Myron Dewey, producer Doug Good Feather, and writer Floris White Bull. It debuted at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival and was later distributed globally on Netflix.
Spione's earlier feature, the well-regarded whistleblower documentary "Silenced," premiered at Tribeca in 2014, screened at various international film festivals, and aired in 2015 across the United States and other countries including France, Germany, Japan, and Canada. The documentary earned a News and Documentary Emmy Award nomination in 2016.
In 2012, Spione received an Academy Award nomination for his documentary "Incident in New Baghdad," which offers a first-person perspective on the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike that resulted in the deaths of two Reuters journalists and approximately a dozen others during a turbulent phase of the Iraq War. This incident gained global attention in April 2010 when WikiLeaks released footage recorded from a helicopter cockpit.
Hailing from New York’s Hudson Valley, Spione graduated from the Film Directing program at the State University of New York at Purchase. He first gained national acclaim in 1987 with a Student Academy Award for his dramatic thesis film "Prelude," which tells the story of a young boy’s solitary trek into the Adirondack Mountains. The Academy digitally restored the film in 2019 for its Short Film Archives.
Throughout the 1990s, Spione created several notable dramatic shorts, including "Garden" (1994), featuring SUNY alumni Melissa Leo (Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actress in "The Fighter") and Matt Malloy ("Six Feet Under"). This haunting period drama about a troubled father's return was part of the Shorts Program at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival and showcased at numerous international festivals.
He subsequently wrote and directed "The Playroom" (1996), starring Pamela Holden Stewart ("The Reception"), which premiered at the Walter Reade Theatre in New York City and aired nationally on the cable series "Reel Street." Additionally, Spione produced and co-edited John G. Young’s debut feature, "Parallel Sons," which premiered in Sundance’s Dramatic Competition and was distributed by Strand Releasing.
In the 2000s, Spione shifted focus to nonfiction filmmaking. His 2005 feature documentary "American Farm" explored the challenges facing his family’s fifth-generation dairy farm in central New York. In 2008, he collaborated with The Barrier Islands Center in Machipongo, Virginia, on "Our Island Home," a historical documentary about the last residents of a now-vanished Eastern Shore settlement. This work sparked a long-term project on the region’s history and culture, resulting in a series of documentaries over nearly two decades, including "Spirit of the Bird" (2012), "Watermen" (2014), "The Last Hunt Clubs" (2016), "Welcome to the Table" (2018), "Gatherings" (2020), "Island Empire" (2022), "The Almshouse" (2024), and "The Native Shore" (2026).
Currently, Spione is completing a documentary on the late African American photojournalist John Shearer, slated to premiere in summer 2026.
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