The sky over Yemen at 1:30 a.m. is dark and still, a vault of deep blackness brushed with a faint smattering of stars. Sprawled on an office chair beneath it, the filmmaker Laura Poitras stares upward, taking in the view.

Yemen’s a complicated place, a flash point in America’s war on terror and currently in the throes of a devastating civil war. Poitras lived there for a while, in a small apartment in the middle of Sana’a, the capital city, filming her 2010 documentary, The Oath. She’d spent much of her adult life in New York, but after 9/11, as so many artists and journalists examined what the attacks had done to America, Poitras picked up her camera and set off to explore what 9/11—or, more accurately, America’s response to it—was doing to the rest of the world. Her work has taken her to Iraq, to Guantánamo Bay, and perhaps most famously to Hong Kong in 2013, where she spent eight tense days holed up in a hotel room with Edward Snowden, filming him up close and in real time as he went from an anonymous computer nerd to the world’s most wanted fugitive. Her film Citizenfour swept the awards season last year, culminating in an Oscar win.

Poitras is once again in New York, having moved back to the city after several years basing herself out of Berlin. We’re in her studio, a few blocks from the Hudson River, peering at the sky in Yemen. It’s a sunny afternoon, but the window shades have been drawn against the light, so that a live video feed from Sana’a can be projected clearly onto a ceiling-mounted screen. Dressed casually in a black cotton shirt, jeans, and sneakers, Poitras, who is 51, leans back in her chair. The sky-cam is an experiment. She is putting together her first major art exhibition, which will occupy the top floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art beginning this month. The exhibit includes a number of short films but is primarily a series of immersive installations, designed almost as a walk-through narrative about the world post 9/11. One idea is to project onto the museum’s ceiling overhead views from parts of the world where the U.S. drone program is active. “I’m interested in going back to these themes of the war on terror,” Poitras says. “What does it mean? How can we understand it on more human terms?”