Biography
Dee Rees is an American film and television director and screenwriter. She graduated from Florida A&M University and New York University's graduate film programme, and was a Sundance Screenwriting and Directing Lab Fellow. Her early work includes the short film Pariah (2007) and the documentary Eventual Salvation (2008).
Rees made her feature debut with Pariah (2011), which she also wrote. She directed the television film Bessie (2015) and the features Mudbound (2017) and The Last Thing He Wanted (2020). With Virgil Williams she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for Mudbound, becoming the first African-American woman nominated in a writing category. She won the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Miniseries or TV Film for Bessie.
Rees has directed episodes of series including Empire (2015), Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams (2017), Space Force (2020), Upload (2020) and Saint X (2023). She directed two episodes of the series Masters of the Air (2024) and received a teleplay credit on one of them.
