Career Achievement Award

Julie Goldman

First given in 1985, the IDA Career Achievement Award is presented annually to an individual film or video maker who, through a body of work, has made a major and lasting contribution to the documentary form. The recipient is selected by IDA’s Board of Directors. Previous recipients include Dawn Porter, Julia Reichert, William Greaves, Les Blank, Sheila Nevins, and Errol Morris.

Julie Goldman is an Oscar-nominated and Emmy Award-winning producer and executive producer of documentary and fiction films and series. Goldman is the first documentary producer to receive the Amazon Studios Sundance Institute Producers Award and the Cinereach Producer’s Award.

She recently produced Selena y Los Dinos, which premiered at Sundance and won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award, in addition to Audience Awards at SXSW and Miami Film Festivals. In 2023, three of her films premiered at Sundance: the Emmy-winning Victim/Suspect, the Grand Jury Prize-winning and Oscar-Nominated The Eternal Memory, and Roger Ross Williams’ acclaimed fiction feature Cassandro, starring Gael Garcia Bernal and featuring Bad Bunny.

Goldman produced Nanfu Wang’s Peabody Award-winning and Oscar-shortlisted In the Same Breath; Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground; the Peabody and Emmy Awards winner A Thousand Cuts, The Return of Tanya Tucker featuring Brandi Carlile, and the Oscar-nominated films Life, Animated, and Abacus. She executive-produced the Oscar-nominated The Mole Agent and the Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning Weiner.

Goldman’s current slate includes the second season of the hit Netflix series A Man on the Inside starring Ted Danson, and new films from directors such as Maite Alberdi, Roger Ross Williams, Kathlyn Horan, and Marcus Lindeen.

Emerging Filmmaker Award

Brittany Shyne

IDA’s Emerging Filmmaker Award has been given annually since 2003 to a filmmaker who by virtue of their early work shows extraordinary promise in exploring the possibilities of the nonfiction art form. The recipient is selected by IDA’s Board of Directors and typically presented to a filmmaker with a notable recent first or second feature film. Previous recipients include Shiori Ito, Nanfu Wang, Alex Rivera, and Natalia Almada.                                               

Brittany Shyne is an independent filmmaker and cinematographer based in Dayton, Ohio. Her debut feature, Seeds, premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it received the esteemed U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Award.

Working in the narrative and nonfiction form, Shyne’s work seeks to depict the complexity of everyday life by examining themes such as personal histories, alienation, and cultural modernization. By utilizing observational techniques and poetic language, her films lyrically weave together frameworks of race, class, culture, and family lineage. She has worked as a cinematographer on films such as The Debutantes (Tribeca, ‘24), This Time, This Place (Tribeca, ‘21), and Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar’s Academy Award-winning film American Factory 美国 工厂(Sundance ‘19). Shyne was the recipient of the 2021 Artist Disruptor Award from the Center of Cultural Power.

Pioneer Award

Impact Partners

Established in 2001 and given occasionally by the IDA Board of Directors, IDA’s Pioneer Award is presented to individuals or institutions who have not only made extraordinary contributions to advancing the nonfiction form but have also generously donated their time, vision, and leadership to the community. Some past recipients of this honor were Jean Tsien in 2021, Ted Sarandos in 2015, Agnès Varda in 2022, and Firelight Media in 2020.

Impact Partners is a Brooklyn-based film fund dedicated to supporting independent documentary storytelling that entertains audiences, engages with pressing social issues, and propels the art of cinema forward. In 2007, Impact Partners pioneered a unique model of funding that brings together a community of investors with filmmakers to tell powerful stories about critical issues facing our world. Over the span of 18 years, Impact Partners has been involved in the financing of over 150 films including: Academy Award® winners and nominees like Icarus, Sugarcane, Of Fathers And Sons, How To Survive A Plague, and Hell And Back Again, Peabody Award winners Aftershock, Immigration Nation, Audrie & Daisy, and The Newburgh Sting, Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner and IDA Best Documentary Feature winner Dina, and Independent Spirit Award winner Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Recent releases include Apocalypse In The Tropics, Folktales, Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, Mistress Dispeller, and Songs From The Hole.