Dee Rees

Dee Rees Bio

Diandrea Rees, known professionally as Dee Rees, is an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter celebrated for bold storytelling about Black women. Her feature Pariah (2011) and Mudbound (2017), as well as HBO’s Bessie (2015) and The Last Thing He Wanted (2020), established her as a distinctive voice in contemporary cinema. Rees became the first African-American woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Mudbound. A United States Artists Fellow in 2011, she continues to explore race, sexuality, and history across film and television.

Early Life and Background

Diandrea Rees was born on February 7, 1977, in Nashville, Tennessee, in the United States. Her father was a police officer and her mother was a scientist at Vanderbilt University. Rees attended local schools and later enrolled at Florida A&M University, where she graduated from business school before pursuing a career in film.

After graduating from college, Rees held an array of jobs in marketing and brand management. She worked as a salesperson for panty-liners and as a vendor for wart-remover and bunion pads. While working for Dr. Scholl’s, Rees worked on set for a commercial and realized she enjoyed the creation of film content. This experience led her to pursue film school and change her career path.

Rees attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for her graduate studies. While at New York University, Spike Lee served as her professor and mentor. This mentorship would prove instrumental in her early career development and her transition into the film industry.

Path to Director

During her time at NYU, Rees worked under Spike Lee on his films Inside Man (2006) and When the Levees Broke (2006). She began developing a script for what would later become her breakthrough feature film Pariah. For her graduate thesis project, she adapted the first act of the script and directed it as a short film of the same name.

The short film version of Pariah was completed as her thesis project and went on to play at 40 film festivals around the world in 2007. The short won numerous accolades, including the Audience Award at the Los Angeles Film Festival. The success of the short film helped Rees secure funding for the feature-length version, which took approximately five years to complete.

Lee executive produced the feature film Pariah, which premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The project marked Rees’s transition from film student to professional filmmaker and established her reputation for authentic storytelling centered on Black women’s experiences.

Dee Rees Career

Early Career (2005-2010)

Rees’s first full-length film was a documentary titled Eventual Salvation (2009), which 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 after barely escaping the devastating Liberian Civil War a decade earlier. This documentary showcased Rees’s interest in personal and historical storytelling.

During this period, Rees continued developing Pariah, which she has described as semi-autobiographical. The process of securing funding for the feature film proved challenging, but Rees persisted in bringing her vision to the screen. The transition from short film to feature required making the story more accessible for a wider audience while maintaining its authentic core.

Breakthrough (2011-2017)

Pariah (2011) marked Rees’s emergence as a major filmmaking talent. The film explores the complexities of religion, politics, and socioeconomic class within and surrounding a Black family, following a young Black lesbian teenager coming to terms with her sexuality. At the time of its release, Pariah was one of the very few films centering on a young person of color navigating their sexual identity and coming out to family and friends.

Rees won multiple awards for Pariah, including the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards, the Gotham Independent Film Award for Breakthrough Director, the Outstanding Independent Motion Picture Award at the NAACP Image Awards, and the Outstanding Film – Limited Release Award at the GLAAD Media Awards in 2012. The film has been compared to the written work of Audre Lorde, particularly Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, for its authentic portrayal of young Black lesbian women’s experiences.

In 2015, Rees directed Bessie for HBO, starring Queen Latifah as the iconic blues singer Bessie Smith. The film was well received by critics and won four Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Television Movie. Rees was nominated for Outstanding Directing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special and Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special.

Notable Works and Milestones

Together with Virgil Williams, Rees wrote and directed Mudbound, a period drama adapted from the 2008 novel of the same name by Hillary Jordan. Starring Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Clarke, Jason Mitchell, and Mary J. Blige, the film premiered at Sundance in 2017 and was purchased by Netflix for $12.5 million, the highest purchase of the festival that year. The film tells the story of two families in the Mississippi Delta in the 1940s, exploring racism and privilege through the contrasting experiences of the white McAllan family and their Black neighbors, the Jacksons.

Rees and Williams were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Mudbound, making Rees the first African-American woman ever nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and the first African-American woman nominated for a writing Oscar since Suzanne de Passe in 1972. Additionally, Mary J. Blige’s nomination for Best Supporting Actress made Rees the first African-American woman to direct a film for which an actor received an Academy Award nomination. Rees won the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Miniseries or TV Film for Bessie in 2016.

Rees later directed The Last Thing He Wanted (2020), based on Joan Didion’s novel and starring Anne Hathaway and Willem Dafoe, distributed by Netflix. She has also directed episodes of television series including Empire, When We Rise, and Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, as well as multiple episodes of the Apple TV+ war miniseries Masters of the Air.

Dee Rees Award Nominations

Dee Rees has received significant recognition throughout her career with multiple prestigious award nominations. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2018 for Mudbound, making history as the first African-American woman to receive a nomination in that category. She also received Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Writing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie and Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for Bessie. In 2018, she was nominated for NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Directing and Outstanding Writing.

Dee Rees Awards Won

Dee Rees has won several notable awards for her work in film and television. She received the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Miniseries or TV Film in 2016 for Bessie. For her debut feature Pariah, she won the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards, the Gotham Independent Film Award for Breakthrough Director, and the Outstanding Independent Motion Picture Award at the NAACP Image Awards. She also won the Outstanding Film – Limited Release Award at the GLAAD Media Awards in 2012 for Pariah and received a United States Artists Fellowship in 2011.

Dee Rees Family

Dee Rees was born to a father who worked as a police officer and a mother who was a scientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her family background and experiences have influenced her filmmaking, particularly in projects like Mudbound where she incorporated her family’s history, including her grandmother’s experiences. Rees has no publicly known children.

Personal Life

Dee Rees is a lesbian and has described her film Pariah as semi-autobiographical, drawing from her own coming out experience. On National Coming Out Day in 2011, Rees discussed how her parents were initially not accepting when she came out, sending her emails, cards, letters, and Bible verses. She incorporates her identity as a Black lesbian woman into her films, creating authentic portrayals of characters with similar experiences.

Since at least 2017, Rees has been in a relationship with poet and writer Sarah M. Broom. The couple is now married and currently resides in Harlem, New York. Rees’s personal life and intersectional identity as a Black lesbian filmmaker inform her distinctive voice and the themes she explores in her work.