Nancy Buirski, an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker, whose eye was honed as a still photographer and picture editor, died on August 30 at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.

Having founded the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in 1998 at Duke University and directing it for a decade, Ms. Buirski made her own first documentary, “The Loving Story,” in 2011. The film explored the case of Mildred and Richard Loving, who faced imprisonment because their interracial marriage in 1968 was illegal in Virginia. The documentary, directed by Ms. Buirski, won an Emmy for outstanding historical programming, long form, and a Peabody Award.

She went on to write and direct other films, but it was a still photograph by Kevin Carter, chosen by her to accompany an article about war and famine in southern Sudan, that secured a first-ever award for the New York Times. The photo showed an emaciated toddler collapsing on the way to a United Nations feeding center as a vulture lurked menacingly in the background. She wanted the image to appear on the front page; she said, “This is going to win the paper’s first-ever Pulitzer Prize for photography.” The photograph ended up appearing on an inside page in the issue of March 26, 1993. It won the Pulitzer in feature photography that year.