Barbara Kopple, the American documentary filmmaker behind Harlan County, USA and American Dream, will serve as president of the 2026 Feature Documentary jury.
Kopple and two fellow jurors, to be announced at the festival, will screen all fourteen feature documentaries across the US and International sections and award the Golden Lens in each. Separate short juries award the Silver Lens; the Jury Prize and Social Impact Star may go to any section. Winners are announced at the closing-night ceremony on Friday, October 30 at AMC River East 21.
Barbara Kopple
Jury President · Feature DocumentaryBorn in New York in 1946, Kopple began her career working with Albert and David Maysles, then spent four years with coal miners and their families during the 1973–74 Brookside strike in Harlan County, Kentucky. The resulting film, Harlan County, USA (1976), won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and was later selected for the National Film Registry.
Her second Academy Award came for American Dream (1990), a chronicle of the Hormel meatpacking strike in Austin, Minnesota, which also won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
- Harlan County, USA (1976) · Academy Award
- American Dream (1990) · Academy Award
- Wild Man Blues (1997)
- Shut Up & Sing (2006, with Cecilia Peck)
- Miss Sharon Jones! (2015)
- Desert One (2019)
A Jury for Observational Cinema
Kopple's patient, embedded way of working suits a lineup built around observation and sustained access — from Hollywoodgate and Daughters in the US feature section to Black Box Diaries and Porcelain War among the international features.
See all twenty-eight official selections on the program page.