James Spione ’85
Academy Award and Emmy nominee James Spione ’85 is a director, producer, writer, and editor of both documentary and fiction films.
His most recent feature, Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock, is a unique collaborative work about the historic indigenous resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline project near Cannon Ball, North Dakota. The film was produced in partnership with director Josh Fox and the late native filmmaker Myron Dewey, producer Doug Good Feather and writer Floris White Bull. The film premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival and was distributed worldwide on Netflix.
Spione’s previous feature, the acclaimed whistle-blower documentary Silenced, premiered at Tribeca in 2014, played at numerous film festivals worldwide, and was broadcast in 2015 both in the United States as well as internationally, including France, Germany, Japan, and Canada. The film was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy Award in 2016.
Spione’s previous feature, the acclaimed whistle-blower documentary Silenced, premiered at Tribeca in 2014, played at numerous film festivals worldwide, and was broadcast in 2015 both in the United States as well as internationally, including France, Germany, Japan, and Canada. The film was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy Award in 2016.
In 2012 Spione was nominated for an Academy Award for his documentary Incident in New Baghdad, a first-person account of the infamous July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike that killed two Reuters journalists, along with about a dozen other individuals, in a suburb of Baghdad during one of the most violent and chaotic periods of the Iraq War. The attack achieved worldwide notoriety in April of 2010 when the WikiLeaks website released a video recording of the incident filmed from the cockpit of one of the helicopters.
Spione first achieved national recognition in 1987, when he earned a Student Academy Award for his dramatic thesis film Prelude, about an adolescent boy’s solo journey into the Adirondack Mountains. In 2018, the Academy began a digital restoration of the film for inclusion in its Short Film Archives.
During the 1990s, Spione wrote and directed several other notable dramatic shorts, including Garden (1994), which starred fellow Purchase alum Melissa Leo (2011 Best Supporting Actress for The Fighter) and Matt Malloy ’86 (Six Feet Under). An eerie period drama about a disturbed father’s homecoming, Garden was featured in the Shorts Program at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival and played at numerous other international film festivals.
Spione next wrote and directed The Playroom (1996), which premiered at the Walter Reade Theatre in New York City and was broadcast on the national cable program Reel Street. Spione also produced and co-edited John G. Young’s first feature, Parallel Sons, which debuted at Sundance in the Dramatic Competition and was distributed by Strand Releasing. (John G. Young ’85 is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Film at Purchase.)
During the 2000s, Spione began to produce and direct nonfiction films. In 2005, he made American Farm, a feature-length documentary that focused on the predicament of his family’s 5th-generation dairy farm in central New York State.
Spione first achieved national recognition in 1987, when he earned a Student Academy Award for his dramatic thesis film Prelude, about an adolescent boy’s solo journey into the Adirondack Mountains. In 2018, the Academy began a digital restoration of the film for inclusion in its Short Film Archives.
During the 1990s, Spione wrote and directed several other notable dramatic shorts, including Garden (1994), which starred fellow Purchase alum Melissa Leo (2011 Best Supporting Actress for The Fighter) and Matt Malloy ’86 (Six Feet Under). An eerie period drama about a disturbed father’s homecoming, Garden was featured in the Shorts Program at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival and played at numerous other international film festivals.
Spione next wrote and directed The Playroom (1996), which premiered at the Walter Reade Theatre in New York City and was broadcast on the national cable program Reel Street. Spione also produced and co-edited John G. Young’s first feature, Parallel Sons, which debuted at Sundance in the Dramatic Competition and was distributed by Strand Releasing. (John G. Young ’85 is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Film at Purchase.)
During the 2000s, Spione began to produce and direct nonfiction films. In 2005, he made American Farm, a feature-length documentary that focused on the predicament of his family’s 5th-generation dairy farm in central New York State.
In 2008, Spione collaborated with The Barrier Islands Center in Machipongo, Virginia on a historical documentary, Our Island Home, about the last surviving residents of a vanished settlement on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.
The film began what has evolved into an ongoing longitudinal project about the unique history and culture of the region, resulting in a series of documentaries including Spirit of the Bird (2012), Watermen (2014), The Last Hunt Clubs (2016), Welcome to the Table (2018), Gatherings (2020), and Island Empire (2022).
Excerpted from IMDb Mini Biography (By: Morninglight Films)