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Academy Award winner and British Film Institute Fellow Steve McQueen is a British artist and filmmaker. His critically acclaimed first feature Hunger (2008), starring Michael Fassbender as an IRA hunger-striker, won the Camera D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. He re-teamed with Fassbender for his follow-up feature Shame (2011) for which Fassbender won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival for Best Actor, and the movie the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Film. McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave (2013) dominated awards season, winning the Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA and AAFCA Awards for Best Picture while McQueen received DGA, Academy, BAFTA and Golden Globe directing nods. His fourth feature, Widows (2018), was one of the best reviewed films of the year and starred Viola Davis. In 2020, McQueen’s anthology series Small Axe, comprising five original films about resilience and triumph in London’s West Indian community from the late 1960s through the early ‘80s, was awarded Best Picture by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, while McQueen received the Storyteller Award for series at the 16th Annual Final Draft Awards. Small Axe was also the recipient of 15 BAFTA Television nominations. Three of the five films in the series played at the 58th New York Film Festival with Lovers Rock opening the fest, with two of the five selected for the 2020 Cannes Film Festival.

McQueen’s most recent work is the 2023 documentary feature, Occupied City, in which the past collides with the present in McQueen’s excavation of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam; a journey from World War II to recent years of pandemic and protest. Past documentary works include the BAFTA-winning three-part series Uprising (2021) about the tragedy and aftermath of the New Cross fire and subsequent deaths of 13 young Black British people in 1981 that went on to define race relations in the U.K. for a generation. McQueen co-directed and produced Uprising. He also served as a co-producer on Three Minutes — A Lengthening (2021), directed and co-written by Bianca Stigter.

The recipient of many accolades for his work as a visual artist, McQueen was awarded with the Turner Prize in 1999, and represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2009. He has exhibited his artwork in major museums around the world.