USA

Spike Lee was born Shelton Jackson Lee on March 20, 1957, in Atlanta, Georgia. At a very young age, he moved from pre-civil rights Georgia, to Brooklyn, New York. Lee came from artistic, education-grounded background; his father was a jazz musician, and his mother, a schoolteacher. He attended school in Morehouse College in Atlanta and developed his film making skills at Clark Atlanta University. After graduating from Morehouse, Lee attended the Tisch School of Arts graduate film program. He made a controversial short, The Answer (1980), a reworking of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Lee went on to produce a 45-minute film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983), which won a student Academy Award. In 1986, Spike Lee made the film, She’s Gotta Have It, a comedy about sexual relationships. The movie was made for $175,000, and earned $7 million at the box office, which launched his career and allowed him to found his own production company, 40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks. On May 2, 2007, the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival honored Spike Lee with the San Francisco Film Society's Directing Award. In 2008, he received the Wexner Prize. In 2013, he won The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, one of the richest prizes in the American arts. In 2015, Lee received an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his contributions to film. Lee won his first competitive Oscar in 2019, for the adapted screenplay for BlacKkKlansman.

Filmography

Last Hustle in Brooklyn (1977)
The Answer (1980)
Sarah (1981)
Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983)
She’s Gotta Have It (1986)
School Daze (1988)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Mo’ Better Blues (1990)
Jungle Fever (1991)
Malcolm X (1992)
Crooklyn (1994)
Clockers (1995)
Lumière et compagnie (1995)
Girl 6 (1996)
Get on the Bus (1996)
Michael Jackson: HIStory on Film – Volume 2 – They Don’t Care About Us (1997)
4 Little Girls (1997)
He Got Game (1998)
Freak (1998)
Pavarotti & Friends for the Children of Liberia (1998)
Pavarotti & Friends 99 for Guatemala and Kosovo (1999)
Summer of Sam (1999)
And Ya Don’t Stop: Hip Hop’s Greatest Videos, Vol. 1 – Fight the Power (2000)
The Original Kings of Comedy (2000)
Bamboozled (2000)
The Making of Bamboozled (2001)
A Huey P. Newton Story (2001)
The Concert for New York City – Come Rain or Come Shine (2001)
Jim Brown: All American (2002)
Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet – We Wuz Robbed (2002)
25th Hour (2002)
She Hate Me (2004)
Sucker Free City (2004)
Miracle’s Boys (2005)
All the Invisible Children – Jesus Children of America (2005)
Inside Man (2006)
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006)
Katrina (2006)
Shark (2006)
M.O.N.Y. (2007)
Lovers & Haters (2007)
Miracle at St. Anna (2008)
Passing Strange (2009)
Kobe Doin’ Work (2009)
If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise (2010)
Da Brick (2011)
Red Hook Summer (2012)
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014)
Katt Williams: Priceless Afterlife (2014)
Jerrod Carmichael: Love at the Store (2014)
Chi-raq (2015)
Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off the Wall (2016)
BlacKkKlansman (2018)
Impact (2019)
She's Gotta Have It ((TV Series) 2017 - 2019)
New York New York (2020)
Da 5 Bloods (2020)