Sir Steve McQueen was born to immigrant parents (a Grenadian mother and a Trinidadian father) in London, England in 1969 and, following his training in art and design, made his first films in the early 1990s. By 1999 he had won the Turner Prize and in 2006 was appointed an Official War Artist, while his most celebrated film to date, '12 Years A Slave' (2013) won several awards, including a BAFTA for Best Film. His work as an video artist is held in numerous UK public collections, including the British Council, Tate and The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; McQueen was knighted in the 2020 New Years Honours for services to film.
Director, filmmaker and video artist, Steve McQueen was born in 1969 in London, England to a Grenadian mother and a Trinidadian father, who had immigrated to England in the 1960s. He grew up on the White City Estate, west London and attended Drayton Manor High School and Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College before studying art and design at Chelsea College of Arts (1987-90). He subsequently enrolled on a Fine Art course at Goldsmiths College, where he made his first films. Graduating in 1993, he made the black and white film, Bear, dealing with violence, homoeroticism and race, themes that continue to influence McQueen's work. In 1997 he made Deadpan, a restaging of a Buster Keaton stunt. His first colour film was Drumroll (1998), subsequently projected onto the walls of an enclosed gallery space to create a more intimate viewing experience.
In 1999 McQueen won the prestigious Turner Prize and was commended for his ability to ‘take a simple incident or image and evoke complex emotions and ideas from them’ (Steve McQueen profile page, Goldsmiths website). In 2006 he was appointed an Official War Artist and in 2007 completed Queen and Country, which commemorated the deaths of British soldiers who lost their lives in the Iraq War. In 2008 he directed his first feature-length film, Hunger, starring Michael Fassbender. Based on the 1981 hunger strike by Irish Republican prisoners in HM Prison Maze, Hunger premiered at the Cannes Film Festival where McQueen became the first British director to win the Caméra d'Or. It also won 'Best Film' at the London Evening Standard Film Awards in 2009, the year McQueen was chosen to represent Great Britain at the 53rd Venice Biennale. In 2011 he co-wrote and directed his second major feature film, Shame. Set in New York and starring Michael Fassbender as a sex addict, Shame premiered at the Venice Film Festival. McQueen’s subsequent and most celebrated film to date, 12 Years A Slave (2013), based on the 1853 autobiography of Solomon Northup, the story of a free man who was forced into slavery, was described by The New Yorker as ‘easily the greatest film ever made about American slavery’ (David Denby, Fighting to Survive, The New Yorker, 13 October 2013). It won several awards, including an Oscar for Best Picture (2014), the first film with a black director to achieve this distinction, as well as a BAFTA for Best Film and a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture. In 2018 McQueen directed Widows, a heist thriller loosely based on a limited series from the 1980s, which follows four Chicago women who attempt to steal $5,000,000 from a prominent local politician in order to pay back a crime boss. McQueen has also worked on producing a film about London’s tragic Grenfell Tower fire, which killed 72 people in June 2017. McQueen, who self-funded the project, will show it to the public in London free of charge, before donating it to a museum. The film is based on footage he gathered from a helicopter in December 2017 before scaffolding was erected around the building. He has also co-written and directed Small Axe, an anthology of five films, shown on BBC and Amazon (2020) exploring the nature of mid twentieth century Caribbean-British experience. Taking its title from a proverb-turned 1970s Bob Marley song, Small Axe features Mangrove, the story of a restaurant owner who became an unlikely leader when his business was the target of police harassment in the late 1960s; Red, White, and Blue which follows Leroy Logan, a research scientist who became a Black officer in London’s Metropolitan Police; and Alex Wheatle which chronicles the eponymous novelist who was imprisoned as a teenager following the Brixton uprising in 1981. McQueen dedicated the series to George Floyd ‘and all the other Black people that have been murdered, seen or unseen, because of who they are’ (Steve McQueen quoted in Alison Herman, Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’ Collapses the Personal and Political, The Ringer, 23 November 2020).
Large-scale surveys of McQueen's work have been held at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester (2017), Tate Modern, London (2020) and Turner Contemporary, Margate (2021). Recent solo presentations have included Steve McQueen: Year 3, Tate Britain (2019-2021) which documented the entire cohort of Year 3 school children in the capital, one of the most ambitious visual documentations of citizenship ever undertaken in Britain. In 2022 a solo exhibition entitled Running Thunder will be presented at Wolverhampton Art Gallery. McQueen has also received numerous honours, including an OBE in 2002, a CBE in 2011 and a knighthood (Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 2020 for services to film. Sir Steve McQueen lives and works between London, England and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His work is held in numerous UK public collections, including the British Council, Tate and The Whitworth, among others.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Steve McQueen]
Publications related to [Steve McQueen] in the Ben Uri Library