Academy Award-nominated and Emmy Award-winning producer/director Liz Garbus was honored on Saturday (6/27) at the 20th annual Nantucket Film Festival with a Special Achievement in Documentary Storytelling.
Garbus is one of America’s most prominent documentary filmmakers. Her most recent documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, opened the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, and screened as NFF’s 20th Anniversary Centerpiece. Now in worldwide release on Netflix, the film delves into the life of Nina Simone, drawing on more than 100 hours of never-before-heard audiotapes, rare concert footage, and archival interviews of the celebrated musician and civil rights activist.
Garbus’ first documentary, The Farm: Angola, USA, made in collaboration with Jonathan Stack, raked in nearly a dozen festival and critics’ awards, including the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, and was nominated for an Oscar in 1999. Several of her films as director have aired on HBO, including Love, Marilyn; There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane; Shouting Fire: Stories From the Edge of Free Speech; The Execution of Wanda Jean; and Bobby Fischer Against the World, which also earned a Primetime Emmy nomination.
In 1998, Garbus co-founded Moxie Firecracker Films with producer/director Rory Kennedy. The two made the feature-length documentary Girlhood, which won the Audience Award at NFF 2003, and executive produced Street Fight, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2006. Other producing credits include Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, the Emmy-winner for Outstanding Non-Fiction Special of 2007; and Killing in the Name, an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Short in 2011.
