Isaac Julien is one of Britain's most innovative and provocative filmmakers. Born in 1960, he comes from a Black, working-class, East London background. Julien studied painting and film at St. Martin's School of Art in London. He was both writer and director for Who Killed Colin Roach?, a 1983 documentary about the controversial death of a young Black man while in police custody. This was followed by Territories in 1984, an experimental video that examined policing at London's Notting Hill Carnival.

A cofounder of Sankofa Film and Video Collective, a pioneering group of young Black British filmmakers, Julien has collaborated with them on several groundbreaking, radical dramas for film and television since the mid- 1980s. With Sankofa, Julien co-wrote and codirected The Passion of Remembrance (1986), an ambitious feature-film drama that offered a fresh and revealing look at Black feminism and Black gay politics. This was followed by the award-winning short film Looking for Langston, in 1988. Set in Harlem in the 1920s, this homoerotic, hauntingly beautiful study of the Black gay American poet Langston Hughes cleverly blended his words with those of the contemporary Black gay poet Essex Hemphill. Looking for Langston received the Golden Teddy Bear for Best Gay Film at the Berlin Film Festival and was shown in Channel 4's innovative lesbian and gay television series Out on Tuesday in 1989. In 1991 Julien directed Young Soul Rebels, a seductive, engaging, and challenging feature-film drama set in 1977, the year of Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee. Once again, Julien explored sexual and racial identities in a provocative way and walked off with the Cannes Film Festival's Critics' Week Prize.

     In 1991 Julien was interviewed with other young Black gay filmmakers in Some of My Best Friends, one of the programs featured in BBC Television's Saturday Night Out, an evening of programs devoted to lesbian and gay viewers. The following year, he directed Black and White in Colour, a two-part documentary for BBC Television that traced the history of Black people in British television from the 1930s to the 1990s. Using archival footage and interviews with such Black participants as Elisabeth Welch, Norman Beaton, Carmen Munroe, and Lenny Henry, Black and White in Colour was well received by the critics. It was also nominated for the British Film Institute's Archival Achievement Award, and the Commission for Racial Equality's Race in the Media Award.

     Since making Black and White in Colour, Julien has directed a short film, The Attendant, and The Dark Side of Black (1994), an edition of BBC Televi­sion's Arena series. This compelling documentary examines the social, cultural, and political influences of rap and reggae music, with particular emphasis on its growing homophobic content. He also directed Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1995), a documentary about the noted theorist of anticolonial resistance, and has created several video-installation pieces, such as Three (1999), The Long Road to Mazatlan (1999), and Vagabondia (2000), which have been displayed in art galleries and museums worldwide. In August 2002, the Independent Film Channel (IFC), a U.S. cable channel, debuted his documentary, Baadassss Cinema, on the history of  "blaxploitation" films. Julien told the New York Times that this work was inspired by research he conducted to teach a course at Harvard University on the genre.