Dee Rees is an award-winning filmmaker and writer whose films, including the Academy Award-nominated historical epic Mudbound, explore a wide variety of subjects, including Black womanhood, history, and conflict. Her debut feature film, Pariah, premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival where it won Best Cinematography and went on to win Independent Spirit, NAACP Image, and GLAAD media awards. She was featured in the 2013 New York Times' "Directors To Watch." Rees is an alumnae of NYU's graduate film and TV program, a Sundance Screenwriting & Directing Lab fellow.
At MacDowell in 2012, Rees completed a feature screenplay adaptation of the latest Toni Morrison novel, Home. Prior to the residency, Dee wrote a biopic about Bessie Smith for HBO and was honored as a 2011 United States Artist Fellow. During her 2014 Fellowship, she worked on a screenplay adaptation of Phillip K. Dick's novel Martian Time Slip.
