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Dee Rees

Rees was born in 1977 in Nashville, Tennessee. She attended local schools and college at Florida A&M University. After business school while working for Dr. Scholl's, Rees worked on set for a commercial and she realized she enjoyed the creation of film content. This led her to pursue film school. For graduate school, she attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. While at New York University for film, Spike Lee was her professor and mentor. Dee Rees went on to work under Spike Lee on his films Inside Man (2006) and When the Levees Broke (2006). During this time, she worked on a script for what would later be the feature film Pariah. For her graduate thesis, she adapted the first act of the script and directed it as a short film of the same name.


Rees' first full-length film was a documentary, Eventual Salvation (2009), aired on the Sundance Channel. The film follows her American-born, 80-year-old grandmother, Amma, as she returns to Monrovia, Liberia to rebuild her home and community. She had barely escaped a decade earlier from the devastating Liberian civil war. Rees completed development and filming of her debut feature film, Pariah, which she has described as semi-autobiographical. In graduate school Rees interned for Spike Lee, whom she got to executive direct the film. It premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.  At the time Pariah (2011) was released, the film was one of the very few films that follow the journey of a young person of colour as they come to terms with their sexuality and come out to their friends and families. Together with Virgil Williams, Rees wrote Mudbound, a period drama adapted from the 2008 novel of the same name by Hillary Jordan. Rees also directed the film, starring Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Clarke, Jason Mitchell, and Mary J. Blige. Mudbound tells a story of racism and race relations that continue to be played out today. The movie explores whiteness and the privilege associated with it, while comparing and contrasting the experiences of white and Black folk of the period.


Rees has upcoming projects including writing and directing An Uncivil War for FilmNation and will adapt The Last Thing He Wanted.


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