Luckily his artistic talent saved him, and when he continued on in school to take higher level art classes, he got to know the kids who had been the school geeks and new worlds opened up to him. “And I realized they were just so cool.” He went on to Chelsea College of Arts, and prestigious Goldsmith’s College, part of the University of the Arts, London where he studied Art and Design. He became interested in Film which he studied briefly at New York University's Tisch School, but he found the approach there too stifling and insufficiently experimental or artistic for his taste. As he explained to journalist Dan P. Lee, “I’d been raised in the art-school practice of experimenting and finding language and such, and film school to a certain extent was military,” he says. He describes the experience as if “someone was loading my hand and forcing me to shoot.” Three months in, he was agonized and crying on the phone to his mother back in England. He calls his decision to leave NYU and return to England the hardest he ever made— “the sacrifice to get there was huge”—though he now talks about the least certain moment of his adult life with total certainty. “I was correct,” he says. Apparently, his refusal to conform to film school restraints and its emphasis of narrative structure allowed him to preserve his own singular vision. His artistic film influences include original maverick talents like Andy Warhol, Sergei Eisenstein, Buster Keaton, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson, and Billy Wilder. When he got back home, in the early 90’s he threw himself into his art, making experimental non-narrative pieces with his video camera. The films were screened in art galleries and in the art world to major critical acclaim. In 2006 he created an artwork entitled “Queen and Country,” commemorating the deaths of British soldiers in Iraq by presenting their portraits as a sheet of stamps. For his artwork, McQueen has received the Turner Prize, the highest award given to a British visual artist. He was also appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2002. For services to the visual arts, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2011. His mainstream film career got started when he was contacted by a Britain’s Channel 4 to make a film. The 2008 feature film Hunger, about Irish revolutionary Bobby Sands and his 1981 IRA hunger strike, premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. McQueen received the Caméra d'Or (first-time director) Award at Cannes, the first British director to win the award. Critics around the world were wowed. The film was also awarded the inaugural Sydney Film Festival Prize, for "its controlled clarity of vision, its extraordinary detail and bravery, the dedication of its cast and the power and resonance of its humanity". The film also won the 2008 Diesel Discovery Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and also won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for a New Generation film in 2008 and the best film prize at the London Evening Standard Film Awards in 2009. He also won a BAFTA for the film. In 2011 he wrote and directed Shame with Michael Fassbinder, also critically acclaimed and a moderately successful film for Fox Searchlight. Cause Magazine
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