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 Naissance d'une 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 n'en fait qu'à sa tête (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 & a Mule Filmworks. His next movie was School Daze (1988), which was set in 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 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 Denzel Washington portrayed the civil rights leader. The movie was a success, and garnering an Oscar nomination for Washington. The pair would work together again on, He Got Game (1998), an excursion into the collegiate world showing the darker side of recruiting college athletes, as well as the 2006 film Inside Man - L'homme de l'intérieur (2006).
Spike Lee's role as a documentarian has expanded over the years, highlighted by his part in Lumière et compagnie (1995), the Oscar-nominated 4 Little Girls (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 Katrina (2006) and its follow-up five years later in If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise (2010).
Through his production company 40 Acres & 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.
