Sir Steve Rodney McQueen (born 9 October 1969) is a British film director, film producer, screenwriter and video artist. He has received several awards including an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards and a Golden Globe Award. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1999; the BFI Fellowship in 2016; and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2020 for services to art and film. In 2014, he was included in Time magazine's annual Time 100 list of the "most influential people in the world".
McQueen made his feature length directorial film debut with the historical drama Hunger (2008) which focused on the 1981 Irish hunger strike followed by the erotic psychological drama Shame (2011) which explored sex addiction. He won the Academy Award for Best Picture directing the historical drama 12 Years a Slave (2013). He also directed the contemporary crime thriller Widows (2018), and the World War II drama Blitz (2024).
For television, McQueen released Small Axe (2020), a collection of five anthology films "set within London's West Indian community from the late 1960s to the early '80s". He also directed the BBC documentary series Uprising (2021) and the documentary film Occupied City (2023).
McQueen was born in London on 9 October 1969, to a Grenadian father and a Trinidadian mother, both of whom migrated to England. He grew up in grew up in Ealing, West London. McQueen was a keen football player, turning out for the West London youth football team St. George's Colts.
McQueen 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". He said that, when he returned to present some achievement awards, the new head of the school claimed that there had been institutional racism at the time. McQueen added that he was dyslexic and had to wear an eyepatch because of a lazy eye, and reflected this might be why he had been "put to one side very quickly".
McQueen took A-level Art at Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College. He went on to study Art and Design at Chelsea College of Arts, mainly working in painting. Later, he studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he first became interested in film. Influenced by Jean Vigo, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, and Andy Warhol, McQueen started making short films. He left Goldsmiths and studied briefly at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts 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".
McQueen's artistic influences include Andy Warhol, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Jean Vigo, Buster Keaton, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson, and Billy Wilder.
1990–2007: Short films and visual art
McQueen's films as an artist were typically projected onto one or more walls of an enclosed space in an art gallery, and often in black-and-white and minimalistic. He has cited the influence of the nouvelle vague and the films of Andy Warhol. He often appeared in the films himself.
In 1995, McQueen met the art curator Okwui Enwezor at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Enwezor became a mentor to him as well as a friend and had a significant influence on McQueen's work.
McQueen's first major work was Bear (1993), in which two naked men (one of them McQueen) exchange a series of glances that might be taken to be flirtatious or threatening. Another early work, Deadpan (1997) is a restaging of a Buster Keaton stunt in which a house collapses around McQueen, who is left unscathed because he is standing where there is a missing window. As well as being in black-and-white, both these films are silent.
The first of McQueen's films to use sound was also the first to use multiple images: Drumroll (1998). This was made with three cameras, two mounted to the sides, and one to the front of an oil drum, which McQueen rolled through the streets of Manhattan. The resulting films were projected on three walls of an enclosed space.
During this time, McQueen also made sculptures such as White Elephant (1998), as well as photographs.
In 1999, McQueen won the Turner Prize for his "range" and "emotional intensity" of his art. However, much of the publicity went to Tracey Emin, who was also a nominee.
In 2006, McQueen went to Iraq as an official war artist commissioned by the Imperial War Museum. The following year, he presented the work Queen and Country (2007), which commemorated the British soldiers killed in the Iraq War by presenting their portraits as sheets of stamps. A proposal to have the stamps placed in circulation was rejected by the Royal Mail.
His 2007, McQueen's short film Gravesend depicted the process of coltan refinement and production. It premiered at The Renaissance Society in the United States.
2008–2018: Breakthrough as filmmaker
In 2008, McQueen's first feature-length film Hunger, about the 1981 Irish hunger strike, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.