Dee Rees is an alum of New York University’s graduate film program and a 2008 Sundance Screenwriting & Directing Lab Fellow. She has written and directed several short films, including Pariah, which has screened at over 40 festivals worldwide including the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and won 25 “Best Short” awards. Rees’s most recent short film, Colonial Gods, aired on the BBC in the fall of 2009 and chronicles a complicated friendship between a Somali man and Nigerian man set against the backdrop of gentrification in a small immigrant community in Cardiff, Wales known as Tiger Bay.

Most recenetly, Rees directed her debut narrative feature film, Pariah, which premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and was acquired by Focus Features. Pariah was a finalist for the 2009 Sundance/NHK International Award as well as the Netflix FIND Your Voice contest and Rees was named as a 2008 Tribeca Institute/Renew Media Arts Fellow for her work. Rees was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 Faces of Independent Film” in 2008.

Rees directed and edited a documentary feature, Eventual Salvation, which received a 2007 Sundance Documentary Fund Grant and premiered on the Sundance Channel in 2009. She worked as a script supervision intern on Spike Lee’s When the Leevees Broke and Inside Man and earned an MBA from Florida A&M University.