Steve McQueen

Sir Steve Rodney McQueen (born 9 October 1969) is a British film director, film producer, screenwriter, and video artist.

His first major work was Bear (1993), in which two naked men (one of them McQueen) exchange a series of glances that might be taken to be flirtatious or threatening.

McQueen met the art curator Okwui Enwezor in 1995 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

Enwezor became a mentor to him as well as a friend and had a significant influence on McQueen's work.

Deadpan (1997) is a restaging of a Buster Keaton stunt in which a house collapses around McQueen, who is left unscathed because he is standing where there is a missing window.

As well as being in black-and-white, both these films are silent.

The first of McQueen's films to use sound was also the first to use multiple images: Drumroll (1998).

This was made with three cameras, two mounted to the sides, and one to the front of an oil drum, which McQueen rolled through the streets of Manhattan.

The resulting films are projected on three walls of an enclosed space.

McQueen has also made sculptures such as White Elephant (1998), as well as photographs.

He won the Turner Prize in 1999, although much of the publicity went to Tracey Emin, who was also a nominee.

In 2006, he produced Queen and Country, which commemorates the deaths of British soldiers in Iraq by presenting their portraits as a sheet of stamps.

In 2006, he went to Iraq as an official war artist.

The following year he presented Queen and Country, a piece that commemorated the deaths of British soldiers who died in the Iraq War by presenting their portraits as sheets of stamps.

A proposal to have the stamps placed in circulation was rejected by the Royal Mail.

His 2007 short film Gravesend depicted the process of coltan refinement and production.

He became known for directing films that deal with intense subject matters such as Hunger (2008), a historical drama about the 1981 Irish hunger strike; Shame (2011), a drama about an executive struggling with sex addiction; 12 Years a Slave (2013), an adaptation of Solomon Northup's 1853 slave narrative memoir; and Widows (2018), a crime thriller set in contemporary Chicago.

For services to the visual arts, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2011.

In 2014, he was included in Time magazine's annual Time 100 list of the "most influential people in the world".

In a 2014 interview, McQueen stated that he had a very bad experience in school, where he had been placed into a class for students believed best suited "for manual labour, more plumbers and builders, stuff like that".

McQueen stated that, when he returned to present some achievement awards, the new head of the school claimed that there had been institutional racism at the time.

McQueen added that he was dyslexic and had to wear an eyepatch because of a lazy eye, and reflected this may be why he was "put to one side very quickly".

He was a keen football player, turning out for the St. George's Colts football team.

He took A-level art at Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College, then studied art and design at Chelsea College of Arts and then fine art at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he first became interested in film.

He left Goldsmiths and studied briefly at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in the United States.

He found the approach there too stifling and insufficiently experimental, complaining that "they wouldn't let you throw the camera up in the air".

His artistic influences include Andy Warhol, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Jean Vigo, Buster Keaton, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson, and Billy Wilder.

McQueen's films as an artist were typically projected onto one or more walls of an enclosed space in an art gallery, and often in black-and-white and minimalistic.

He has cited the influence of the nouvelle vague and the films of Andy Warhol.

He often appeared in the films himself.

He has received an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards and in 2016 the BFI Fellowship.

McQueen began his formal training studying painting at London's Chelsea College of Art and Design.

He later pursued film at Goldsmiths College and briefly at New York University.

Influenced by Jean Vigo, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, and Andy Warhol, McQueen started making short films.

For his artwork, McQueen has received the Turner Prize, the highest award given to a British visual artist.

He released Small Axe (2020), a collection of five films "set within London's West Indian community from the late 1960s to the early '80s" and the BBC documentary series Uprising (2021).

For 12 Years a Slave, he won the Academy Award for Best Picture, the BAFTA Award for Best Film, and the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama.

McQueen is the first black filmmaker to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

McQueen was born in London to a Grenadian mother and a Bajan father, both of whom migrated to England.

He grew up in Ealing, West London, and went to Drayton Manor High School.