Barbara Kopple

Barbara Kopple
Kopple at the Montclair Film Festival, May 2015
Born	(1946-07-30) July 30, 1946 (age 70) New York City, New York

Barbara Kopple (born July 30, 1946) is an American film director known primarily for her documentary work.

She grew up in Scarsdale, New York, the daughter of a textile executive, and studied psychology at Northeastern University, after which she worked with the Maysles Brothers.

Kopple has won two Academy Awards, the first in 1976 for Harlan County, USA, about a Kentucky miners' strike, and the second in 1991 for American Dream, the story of the Hormel Foods strike in Austin, Minnesota in 1985-86. She has directed episodes of the television drama series Homicide: Life on the Street and Oz, winning a Directors Guild of America award for the former. Kopple also directed A Conversation With Gregory Peck and Bearing Witness, 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, starred Anne Hathaway and Bijou Phillips as wealthy suburbanites who venture into East Los Angeles Latino gang territory, and was released straight to DVD in 2005. Kopple has recently ventured into advertising work that includes documentary-style commercials for Target Stores.