Jehane Noujaim

Jehane Noujaim (born 17 May 1974) is an American documentary film director best known for Control Room, Startup.com, Pangea Day and The Square. ¹ The Square was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, a first for an Egyptian film. ¹ No source read for this record attests a personal religion for her, and her faith is recorded as unknown in her data record. ¹

She was born in Washington, D.C., to an Egyptian-Syrian-Lebanese father and an American mother born in Connecticut, and was raised in Kuwait and Cairo before moving to Boston by the age of 10, in 1984. ¹ Her parents' origins are ancestry, not a faith attestation, and no religion is inferred for her from them. ¹ She attended Milton Academy and entered Harvard University in 1992, switching from medicine to visual arts and philosophy and graduating magna cum laude in 1996. ¹

Under a Gardiner fellowship she directed Mokattam, an Arabic film about a garbage-collecting village near Cairo, and joined MTV's news and documentary division as a segment producer for UNfiltered. ¹ In 2001 she left to produce and direct Startup.com under D. A. Pennebaker, which won the DGA and IDA awards for best documentary. ¹ She has also worked as a cinematographer on documentaries including Born Rich and Only the Strong Survive. ¹

Control Room (2004) examines United States Central Command and its relations with Al Jazeera and other news organisations covering the 2003 invasion of Iraq, asking how viewers perceive images of war. ¹ In 2006 she won the TED Prize for the film, and used her wish to organise Pangea Day, a live global film event held on 10 May 2008 linking New York, Rio de Janeiro, London, Dharamsala, Cairo, Jerusalem and Kigali. ¹

The Square (2013) follows young revolutionaries in Tahrir Square from the fall of President Mubarak into the uncertainty of military rule. ¹ During filming she was arrested on three occasions, and the film was withheld from viewers in Egypt by censorship, so she released it online. ¹ It won acclaim at Sundance and Toronto, the DGA Award in 2014, and an Academy Award nomination. ¹

With Karim Amer she directed The Great Hack (2019), on the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, and The Vow (2020–2022), a documentary series on the NXIVM organisation and its leader Keith Raniere. ¹ She has also served as executive producer on Flight/Risk (2022) and Defiant (2023). ¹

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