By: Andrew Schneider, Mahadhi Walker, Ianna Salvary, Tamika Dunnaway, Sylvester Nankishorelal, Parwinder Singh, Cailin Frazier, LaPorsha Pitt, Andrew Jones

Spike Lee

· Born Shelton Jackson Lee, Spike Lee is one of America’s most well known filmmakers. He is known for his uncompromising, provocative approach to controversial subject matter.

· The son of the jazz composer Bill Lee, he was reared in a middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood. He majored in communications at Atlanta's Morehouse College, where he directed his first Super-8 films and met his future co-producer, Monty Ross.

· In 1978 Lee entered New York University's Graduate Film School, where he met another future collaborator, cinematographer Ernest Dickerson. He gained national attention with his master's thesis, the short subject Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (as he explained at the time, the barbershop “is second only in importance to the church in the black community”), which earned him the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science's Student Award.

· Lee's feature film debut was She's Gotta Have It (1986), a character study about the love life of a contemporary black woman. Lee not only wrote, produced, directed, and edited the film but also played a key supporting role.

· Many of Lee's films can be classified as family affairs: his father, Bill, contributed music to She's Gotta Have It and Mo' Better Blues, among others; his sister, Joie, played major roles in several productions; and his brother David Charles Lee was the still photographer.

· The outspoken Lee cited what he perceived as Hollywood's anti-black bias, noting that, while Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, and his poignant documentary 4 Little Girls (1997) all received Academy Award nominations, he was repeatedly denied an Oscar win.

· Lee also made the following movies:

* School Daze (1988), a scatological satire of color prejudice, snobbery, and betrayal within the black academic community.

* Do the Right Thing (1989), an impassioned but evenhanded work that neither blamed any specific group for racial violence nor absolved any from it.

* Jungle Fever (1991)

* Get on the Bus (1996).

* Malcolm X (1992)

* Mo' Better Blues (1990)

* Summer of Sam (1999)

* He Got Game (1998)

* 25th Hour (2002),