Ang Lee

ANG LEE was born in Pingtung County in southern Taiwan. The son of a high school principal with very traditional ideas about education, Lee chose a less conventionally academic path, which led him to the United States to study theater at the University of Illinois. In 1984, he received an M.F.A. in film from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. In 1990, Lee’s scripts for Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet won first and second place in a Taiwanese government screenwriting competition and, with the independent production company Good Machine on board as producers, they became his first two feature films. Lee went on to direct Eat Drink Man Woman; Sense and Sensibility; The Ice Storm; Ride with the Devil; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, 2000); Hulk; Brokeback Mountain (Academy Award for Best Director, 2005), Lust, Caution; Taking Woodstock; and Life of Pi. The father of two grown sons, he lives with his wife in New York.