Sir Steve McQueen

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

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. 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.