American filmmaker, the central figure in the emergence of a sustained Black American art cinema from the mid-1980s onward and one of the most politically engaged American directors of his generation. Over four decades he has directed roughly thirty feature films and a large body of documentary work, and his best films have been arguments — explicit, contested, and often very popular — about race, class, and the American city.
Lee grew up in Brooklyn in a Black middle-class artistic family (his father Bill Lee is a jazz bassist who scored several of his early films), took a BA at Morehouse, studied film at NYU, and made his feature debut with the independently financed She's Gotta Have It (1986). Do the Right Thing (1989), his third feature, is his canonical work: a single day on a single block in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, during a heatwave, ending in the killing of the character Radio Raheem by police and the burning of the neighborhood pizzeria. The film was widely read at release as a provocation and in the decades since has been recognized as the major American film on race and the city of its decade — preserved in the National Film Registry in 1999, its ten-year anniversary edition now used as a reference text in urban-history courses.
The work extends in several directions. Malcolm X (1992), the three-hour epic biography starring Denzel Washington, is the most ambitious American biographical film on a Black political figure. Get on the Bus (1996) follows twenty Black men on a bus to the 1995 Million Man March. Bamboozled (2000) is a bitter satire on the television industry's use of Black performers. Inside Man (2006) and 25th Hour (2002) operate as mainstream genre films with unusual social density. When the Levees Broke (2006) is a four-hour documentary on Hurricane Katrina. BlacKkKlansman (2018) — the true story of a Black police officer who infiltrated the Colorado KKK in the 1970s — won Lee his first competitive Oscar (for adapted screenplay, after an honorary Oscar in 2015).
Lee has taught at NYU's Tisch School since 2002 and runs his own production company, 40 Acres and a Mule, named after the Reconstruction-era promise never kept.