Jaie Laplante

Jaie Laplante has been Artistic Director of DOC NYC, America’s largest documentary festival, since 2022. At DOC NYC, he has led a programming team of 9 senior programmers and overseen the administration of the annual programming. In 2023, he inaugurated a new weekly screening series at IFC Center, DOC NYC Selects, which annually runs from February to August.

Prior to joining DOC NYC, Laplante led Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival as Executive Director & Director of Programming from 2010 to 2022, overseeing the Festival’s growth and influence from its 28^th annual edition onwards into its fourth decade. Additionally, he directed and oversaw Tower Theater Miami, one of the USA’s oldest and most celebrated year-round independent art cinemas, until its closure in 2022.

Laplante has served on numerous international juries and film panels, as well as lectured at events including festivals and markets in Barcelona, Munich, Warsaw, Edinburgh, Bogota, Santiago de Chile, San Jose, Costa Rica, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Palm Springs, CA and Cleveland, OH. He is a member of the nominating committee of the Cinema Eye Honors.

In Toronto and Los Angeles in the 1990s, Laplante worked on numerous independent productions and developed screenplays, and received an Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for the made-in-Toronto film Sugar, directed by John Palmer.

In 2017, he was named one of 25 Knight Champions, honoring passionate individuals in Miami who love the arts, on the occasion of The John S. & James L. Knight Foundation’s tenth anniversary of the Knight Arts Challenge. In 2018, Laplante received the decoration Knight’s Cross of the Order of Isabel la Católica from Felipe VI, King of Spain, for his career work in the exploration of contemporary Spanish cinema in the state of Florida.

Previously, Laplante served as Director of Programming (2008-2009) for Miami Short Film Festival and as Co-Director of Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (2003-2006). In the preceding decades, he published more than 400 pieces on contemporary commercial and international art cinema for a variety of publications as a critic and journalist.

Laplante is an alumnus of York University, Toronto, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Film/Video Production.