Prominent film producer, actor and director Spike Lee will speak at the Busch Student Center Multi-purpose Room at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 27. Passes for the event are now available in the Student Life office. The Black Student Alliance, in conjunction with the Great Issues Committee, is sponsoring the event.

Specifically, Lee will be addressing the “Media’s Effect on Black America” as the Black History Month keynote speaker for BSA.

“The goal of the Black Student Alliance is to educate,” said BSA President Dominique Gonzales, in order “for everyone to understand each other, to work together and to learn together.” Part of that goal is “dispelling stereotypes that are developed on how people are portrayed in the media,” Gonzales continued, commenting on the purpose of Lee’s visit as the keynote speaker.

Hopeful that there will be room for a question and answer portion of the lecture, Gonzales is particularly anxious to hear what other students think about such an issue.

Speaking for GIC, Natalie Long, chair of the committee, said, “We feel [Spike Lee] would be beneficial to the SLU community” because he encourages debate.

Born in 1957, Spike Lee moved to Brooklyn, New York, from Georgia according to the Internet Movie Database. With a jazz musician father and a school teacher mother, Lee developed a keen insight of American life and culture while in Brooklyn.

As a young man, Lee enrolled in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts’ graduate film-studies program.

There, his master’s thesis film, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, earned a student academy award and critical notice.

Lee’s first major arrival into the public arena was with his next film, She’s Gotta Have It, in 1986. From then on, Spike Lee became known as a director of many inventive and incisive films, such as Jungle Fever in 1991, Malcom X in 1992, Crooklyn in 1994 and, probably most notably, Do the Right Thing in 1989.

Marked by political savvy, a keen sense of social justice, African-American and wholly American culture, Lee’s films have gained status as having a distinct style of filmmaking, both artistically and dexterously, that has been revered and studied over the past two decades.

Reflecting the themes of social activism and demonstrative defiance toward the audience exhibited within his films, Lee is very publicly outspoken, especially about African-American culture. In a guest lecture at DePauw University in 2003, Lee, commenting on his films, said that they “somehow showcase different aspects of the African-American experience. Growing up, I’d see all this richness of our culture just standing on the corner or looking out the window, but rarely was it reflected on the screen or on television.”

Throughout his career, the media have had a reputation for misconstruing many of Lee’s public comments. Consequently, some have regarded him as a figure of controversy, a quality that BSA and GIC find attractive, in that it “instigates dialogue,” said Long.