“Images need to mean something. They need to tell a story. There’s a big difference in making imagery—just doing the shot—and telling the story.”
Growing up, Ellen Kuras had many passions, ranging from Egyptology and sculpture to sports. In her professional life, she’s proven to be just as eclectic, shooting features, commercials, concert films, and documentaries with equal aplomb. She’s incredibly determined: her own documentary, The Betrayal (a story about what happens to a Laotian soldier and his family when the US abandons its allies after the Secret Air War in Laos), was begun as a Master’s thesis film in 1984, yet she continued to follow her subjects for the next 20 years.
Her work on feature films began with Swoon (Tom Kalin, 1992), which won the Excellence in Cinematography Award, Dramatic, at Sundance. Her lensing is marked by its intimacy, and she’s enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with Spike Lee on 4 Little Girls (1997), He Got Game (1998), Summer of Sam (1999), and Bamboozled (2000). She has worked with director Michel Gondry on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Block Party (2005), and Be Kind Rewind (2008), balancing the filmmaker’s whimsical spirit with a graceful, lived-in quality that gives his films an emotional resonance. Kuras has also collaborated with writer–director Rebecca Miller on Angela (1995), (for which she won her second Best Dramatic Cinematography prize at Sundance), Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (2002), (for which she won her third Best Dramatic Cinematography award), and The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005). Kuras is the only person to win the Sundance award three times.
In addition, she has been a part of some of the most memorable music documentaries of recent times, as the director of photography or working as a cameraperson on No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005), Neil Young: Heart of Gold (2006), Berlin (2007), and Shine a Light (2008). She continues to work as one of the few women cinematographers in the studio world, having shot Blow (2001), and Analyze That (2002).
