Biography:

Steven Rodney "Steve" McQueen CBE (born 9 October 1969) is a British film director, producer, screenwriter, and video artist. He is a winner of the Caméra d'Or and two BAFTAs. His 2013 film, 12 Years a Slave, won him the award for best director from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture at the 71st Golden Globe Awards, and the award for best film at the 2014 BAFTAs. McQueen is known for his collaborations with actor Michael Fassbender, who has starred in all of McQueen's three feature films as of 2013.

For his artwork, McQueen has received the Turner Prize, the highest award given to a British visual artist, and in 2006 produced Queen and Country, commemorating the deaths of British soldiers in Iraq by presenting their portraits as a sheet of stamps. For services to the visual arts, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2011.

McQueen was born in London. He grew up in West London and went to Drayton Manor High School. In a 2014 interview, McQueen stated that he had a very bad experience in school, where he had been placed into a class for students believed best suited "for manual labour, more plumbers and builders, stuff like that." Later, the new head of the school would admit that there had been "institutional" racism at the time. McQueen added that he was dyslexic and had to wear an eyepatch due to a lazy eye, and reflected this may be why he was "put to one side very quickly".

He was a keen football player, turning out for the St. Georges Colts football team. He took A level art at Hammersmith and West London College, then studied art and design at Chelsea College of Art and Design and then fine art at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he first became interested in film. He left Goldsmiths and studied briefly at New York University's Tisch School in the United States. He found the approach there too stifling and insufficiently experimental, complaining that "they wouldn't let you throw the camera up in the air". His artistic influences include Andy Warhol, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Jean Vigo, Buster Keaton, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson, and Billy Wilder.

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