Steve McQueen

Steven Rodney McQueen CBE is a British film director and screenwriter. For his 2013 film, 12 Years a Slave, a historical drama adaptation of an 1853 slave narrative memoir, he won an Academy Award, BAFTA Award for Best Film, and Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama, as a producer, and he also received the award for Best Director from the New York Film Critics Circle. McQueen is the first black filmmaker to win an Academy Award for Best Picture.

McQueen's other feature films include Hunger, a historical drama about the 1981 Irish hunger strike, Shame, a drama about an executive struggling with sex addiction, and 2018's Widows, a thriller about a group of women who vow to finish the heist their husbands died attempting. McQueen frequently collaborates with actor Michael Fassbender, who has starred in three of McQueen's feature films.

For his artwork, McQueen has received the Turner Prize, the highest award given to a British visual artist. In 2006 he produced Queen and Country, which commemorates 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.

In April 2014, TIME magazine included McQueen in its annual TIME 100 as one of the "Most Influential People in the World." In October 2016, McQueen was granted the British Film Institute's highest honor, the BFI Fellowship.