Award winning Minneapolis filmmaker Norah Shapiro left a decade-long career as a public defender to work as a documentary filmmaker, and hasn’t looked back since. Her latest film, Time for Ilhan about the rise of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (the nation’s 1st Somali-American legislator) premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, and premiered internationally at the 2018 Hot Docs Film Festival in its Silence Breakers spotlight and Docs for Schools program. Time for Ilhan has won multiple awards including HBO Best Feature Documentary Audience Award at the Provincetown International Film Festival, and Best U.S. Feature Documentary at the 2018 Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. Recently, Norah received How Women Lead’s 2019 Changing the Narrative award. The film, still on the festival circuit, launches its impact tour in March, 2019.

Norah’s first feature documentary Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile (2014) premiered at the 2014 DOC NYC Film Festival, and screened widely at festivals throughout the U.S. and abroad. She is currently producing a documentary about the far-reaching impact of a notorious abduction of a young boy in rural Minnesota, and is also developing a project about a young woman’s quest to create the nation’s 1^st Memorial to survivors of sexual violence.

Norah received the 2012 McKnight Filmmaking Fellowship, and numerous production and completion funding awards from funders including the Catapult Film Fund, the Harnisch Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Norah is a proud, founding member of the Minnesota Chapter of Film Fatales. Her production company, Flying Pieces Productions produces freelance video content, specializing in helping social change-makers harness the power of video to tell their stories.