Sam Pollard

Veteran editor, producer, and director Sam Pollard is among cinema’s most dedicated chroniclers of the Black experience in America, moving freely across film and long-form television as well as narrative and documentary for the past four decades. From his collaborations with St. Clair Bourne, Henry Hampton, and Spike Lee to his own documentaries exploring complicated American figures and the extended aftershocks of racial inequality, Pollard continues to create films notable for their journalistic thoroughness and cogent structure. Spike Lee, whose films Pollard has edited and produced, described him as being "a master filmmaker."
In 1998, Pollard received an Academy Award nomination for 4 Little Girls with Spike Lee. In 2010, Pollard (with Geeta Gandbhir and Arielle Amsalem) received an Emmy Award (Outstanding Picture Editing for Nonfiction Programming) for the film By the People: The Election of Barack Obama.
MLK/FBI was named best documentary at the 2020 San Diego International Film Festival.
In 2020, the International Documentary Association gave him a career achievement award.