Spike Lee
Influential Director, Filmmaker, Actor & Producer
Hollywood has produced few young filmmakers as iconoclastic and uncompromising as Spike Lee. Not content with the old formulas, he has set about reshaping the nature and the importance of American movies. In his hands a camera becomes as potent a weapon of social criticism as the pen.
Spike Lee has established himself as one of Hollywood’s most important and influential Filmmakers in the past decade. The 1999 release of Summer of Sam which stared John Leguizamo & Mira Sorvino was met with critical acclaim. His other most recent films include He Got Game, starring Denzel Washington and Ray Allen, Girl 6 and Get on the Bus. These movies follow some of his most critically-acclaimed films Malcolm X, Clockers and Do The Right Thing. In 1986, his debut independently produced film, She’s Gotta Have It, earned him the Prix de Jeunesse Award at the Cannes Film festival and set him at the forefront of the Black New Wave in American Cinema. School Daze, his second feature, was not only highly profitable, but it also helped launch the careers of several young Black actors. Spike’s timely 1989 film, Do The Right Thing, garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and Best Film & Director awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association..
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Brooklyn, Spike returned South to attend Morehouse College. After graduation, he returned to Brooklyn to continue his education at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in Manhattan where he received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in film production. Lee then founded 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks based in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, where he has resided since childhood..
In addition to his achievements in feature films, Spike Lee has produced and directed numerous music videos for such diverse artists as Miles Davis, Chaka Khan, Tracy Chapman, Anita Baker, Public Enemy, Bruce Hornsby and Michael Jackson. His other music videos include work for the late Phyliss Hyman, Naughty by Nature, and Arrested Development..
Lee’s presentations are a marriage of film, politics, and social criticism. They are as stimulating, as uncompromising, and as unforgettable as his film work. Audiences will debate ideas and issues both before, during, and long-after his presentation.