Nancy Buirski

Nancy Buirski (born 25 June 1945) is an American photographer, documentary filmmaker and producer.

Nancy Buirski at the Peabody Awards 2013

Life

Nancy Florence Buirski was born to Helen Housten Cohen and Daniel S. Cohen. She grew up in New York City in Manhattan. She graduated from Adelphi University in Garden City, New York with magna cum laude. Until the mid-1990s, Buirski worked as a photographer and picture editor in the international department of The New York Times.[1] In 1994, her image selection of a photo taken by Kevin Carter, which showed a half-starved Sudanese child, resulted in the newspaper winning its first Pulitzer Prize for feature photo reporting. In the same year, her book Earth Angels: Migrant Children in America, was published by Pomegranate Press. It contained 150 photographs by Buirski of children of migrant farmworkers in New York, Florida, California, Washington, and Texas, showing young children at play but also at work during the day and going to school at night. The book raises issues related to exposure to pesticides and other hazards, oppressive heat, low wages, and bad housing.[2][3]

In 1998 Buirski founded the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, held at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and directed it for ten years. However, she did not herself make documentaries until The Loving Story in 2011, which concerned the case of Mildred and Richard Loving, an interracial couple. Married in the District of Columbia in 1958 they had not realized that their marriage was illegal in Virginia, where they lived, and were only able to avoid imprisonment by agreeing to leave the state. After a lengthy legal battle, the Supreme Court found unanimously in their favor in 1967. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the film premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and was later presented at numerous other events. The film won an Emmy.[4] Bierski was awarded a prize for The Loving Story at the Peabody Awards in 2012[5] and the movie was also on the shortlist for the Oscar in the category Best Documentary. The documentary was used by director Jeff Nichols as inspiration for the movie Loving (2016), for which Buirski was a producer.[3]

Buirski's second documentary, in 2013, Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq tells the story of the French ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, who contracted polio in 1956 while on tour, and remained paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of her life. Buirski followed this in 2015 with By Sidney Lumet, which provides a portrait of the American movie director Sidney Lumet, based on an interview made in 2008. Lumet talks about his films, remembers colleagues, family and friends and looks back at the beginning of his career as an actor in a Jewish theater group.[3]

In 2017, Buirski made a documentary entitled The Rape of Recy Taylor about Recy Taylor, an African-American woman from Abbeville in Henry County, Alabama. In 1944, Taylor was kidnapped while leaving church and gang-raped by seven white men.[6] Despite the men's confessions, two grand juries declined to indict them and no charges were ever brought.[7] In 2011, the Alabama Legislature officially apologized on behalf of the state "for its failure to prosecute her attackers." The film was awarded the Human Rights prize at the 74th Venice International Film Festival.

Buirski is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to her documentaries, she has produced several collections of Full Frame shorts and a collection of feature-length documentaries. The Katrina Experience brings together a collection of films about Hurricane Katrina,[8] while Time Piece is a cross-cultural collection of Turkish and American shorts. She also produced Althea, a film about the Black tennis player, Althea Gibson.[9]

References
  1. "Nancy Buirski, Kenneth Friedlein". nytimes.com. 22 December 1996.
  2. Buirski, Nancy; Cisneros, Henry G. (Introduction); Blades, Ruben (Afterword) (1994). Earth Angels: Migrant Children in America. Pomegranate Artbooks. ISBN 9780876540732.
  3. "Nancy Buirski - Director, Producer, Writer". Afternoon of a Faun. Retrieved 7 July 2020.
  4. "WINNERS ANNOUNCED FOR THE 34TH ANNUAL NEWS & DOCUMENTARY EMMY® AWARDS". emmyonline.org. October 1, 2013. Archived from the original on May 5, 2015. Retrieved November 26, 2013.
  5. "Awards". Peabody:Stories that matter. Retrieved 8 September 2020.
  6. McGuire, Danielle L. (2010). At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. Random House. ISBN 978-0-307-26906-5.
  7. Chan, Sewell (December 29, 2017). "Recy Taylor, Who Fought for Justice After a 1944 Rape, Dies at 97". New York Times. Retrieved December 30, 2017.
  8. "The Katrina Experience". IndeiPix Films. Retrieved 7 July 2020.
  9. "Nancy Buirski". Augusta Films: Our Team. Retrieved 7 July 2020.
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