Jehane Noujaim (, ) (born May 17, 1974) is an Academy Award nominated American documentary film director best known for her films Control Room, Startup.com, Pangea Day and The Square. In 2019, she co-directed The Great Hack with Karim Amer. Background Noujaim was born to a Lebanese father and an American mother who was born in Connecticut. She was raised in Kuwait and Cairo and moved to Boston by the age of 10, in 1984. She attended Milton Academy. In 1992, Noujaim matriculated to Harvard University, where she initially intended to study medicine. She later switched to visual arts and philosophy after taking an interest in photography and filmmaking, graduating magna cum laude in 1996. Career 2000-2005 While studying at Harvard University, Noujaim worked alongside her fellow peers towards developing Blue Hill Avenue, about the operations of gangs in Roxbury, Boston. Also during the duration of her degree, Noujaim notably worked under mentor Robb Moss. In 2002, before her graduation, Noujaim was awarded the Gardiner fellowship under which she directed Mokattam, an Arabic film about a garbage-collecting village near Cairo in Egypt. Noujaim joined the MTV news and documentary division as a segment producer for the documentary series UNfiltered. In 2001, she left to produce and direct Startup.com under the guidance of documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker in association with Pennebaker Hegedus Films. The feature length documentary won the DGA and IDA Awards for best documentary. From collaboration with D.A. Pennebaker and Hegedus throughout her career, Noujaim’s filmmaking techniques take insight from cinéma verité. Noujaim was awarded the Jacqueline Donnet Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award in 2004. She has since worked in both the Middle East and the United States as a cinematographer on various documentaries including Born Rich, Only the Strong Survive, and Down from the Mountain. In 2004, she directed the feature-length film Control Room, a documentary about US Central Command and its relations with Al Jazeera and other news organizations that covered the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The film showed the unfolding of war through the descriptions and contributions of entities in media outlets. It also displayed information on the impact of skewed information during the Iraq war from different media source's operations and public motives. Noujaim achieves this through live footage from her time in Qatar of the war as well as interviews from news room correspondents. Through this project, Noujaim wanted to portray images of war and