Spike Lee was born Shelton Jackson Lee on March 20, 1957, in Atlanta, Georgia. At a very young age, he moved from pre-civil rights Georgia, to Brooklyn, New York. Lee came from artistic, education-grounded background; his father was a jazz musician, and his mother, a
schoolteacher. He attended school in Morehouse College in Atlanta and developed his film making skills at Clark Atlanta University. After
graduating from Morehouse, Lee attended the Tisch School of Arts graduate film program. He made a controversial short, The Answer (1980), a reworking of D.W. Griffith's Die Geburt einer Nation (1915), a ten-minute film. Lee went on to produce a 45-minute film Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983) which won a student Academy Award.
In 1986, Spike Lee made the film, Nola Darling (1986), a comedy about sexual relationships. The movie was made for $175,000, and earned $7 million at the box office, which launched his career and allowed him to found his own production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. His next movie was School Daze (1988), which was set at a historically black school, focused mostly on the conflict between the school and the Fraternities, of which he was a strong critic, portraying them as materialistic, irresponsible, and uncaring. With his School Daze (1988) profits, Lee went on to make his landmark film, Do the Right Thing (1989), a movie based specifically his own neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. The movie portrayed the racial tensions that emerge in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood on one very hot day. The movie garnered Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay, for Danny Aiello for supporting actor, and
sparked a debate on racial relations.
Lee went on to produce and direct the jazz biopic Mo' Better Blues (1990), the first of many Spike Lee films to feature Denzel Washington, including the biography of Malcolm X (1992), in which Washington portrayed the civil rights leader. The movie was a success, and garnered an Oscar nomination for Washington. The pair would work together again on Spiel des Lebens (1998), an excursion into the collegiate world showing the darker side of college athletic recruiting, as well as the 2006 film Inside Man (2006).
Spike Lee's role as a documentarian has expanded over the years, highlighted by his participation in Lumière and Company (1995),
the Oscar-nominated Vier kleine Mädchen (1997), to his Peabody Award-winning biographical adaptation of Black Panther leader in A Huey P. Newton Story (2001), through his 2005 Emmy Award-winning examination of post-Katrina New Orleans in Als die Deiche brachen: Ein Requiem in vier Akten (2006) and its follow-up five years later If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise (2010).
Through his production company 40 Acres and A Mule Filmworks, Lee continues to create and direct both independent films and projects for
major studios, as well as working on story development, creating an internship program for aspiring filmmakers, releasing music, and community outreach and support.
He is married to Tonya Lewis Lee, and they have two sons, Satchel and Jackson.
