In 2008, she released her directorial debut, The Betrayal (Nerakhoon), which she co-directed, co-wrote, co-produced and shot. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2009. In 2010, she won a Primetime Emmy Award for Exceptional Merit in Non-Fiction Filmmaking for the film.
Early life and education
Kuras grew up in Cedar Grove, New Jersey.[1] Kuras had a fever as an infant, leaving her almost deaf in one ear and with about 20% hearing in the other.[2]
She attended Cedar Grove High School, where she served as president of the school's chapter of the National Honor Society.[3] After earning a double degree in anthropology and semiotics at Brown University, she studied photography at RISD and 8mm filmmaking in New York, with the plan to become a documentary filmmaker. In the early 1980s, Kuras planned to study on a Fulbright grant at a film school in Poland but was unable to go due to the introduction of martial law.[4] She is of Polish descent on her father's side and the family surname was originally Kuraś.[5]
Career
Kuras began her film career in 1987, shooting Ellen Bruno's Samsara: Death and Rebirth in Cambodia, the first US movie filmed in Cambodia after the Vietnam War. In 1990 she won the Eastman Kodak Best Cinematography Focus Award for her work on Samsara.[citation needed] The film got notice from the Student Academy Awards[citation needed] and the Sundance Film Festival where it received Special Jury Recognition.[citation needed]
^Hart, Hugh (March–April 2009). "The Silent Witness". Brown Alumni Magazine. Retrieved October 15, 2017. Her family life was happy enough while she was growing up in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, from which she left for Brown in 1977.
^"Memos From Memorial High", Verona-Cedar Grove Times, June 17, 1976. Accessed February 1, 2022, via Newspapers.com. "The Memorial High School Chapter of the National Honor Society recently held its end of the school year meeting. Officers for the 1976-77 school year were elecged as follows: President, Ellen Kuras"
