Steve James' affiliation with Kartemquin began in 1987 with the start of production of Hoop Dreams, for which he served as director, producer, and co-editor. He has since then become one of the most acclaimed documentary makers of his generation, with noted works being Stevie, The New Americans, The War Tapes, At the Death House Door, The Interrupters, and most recently, Life Itself.
Steve's first film Hoop Dreams won every major critics award in 1994 as well as a Peabody and Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 1995. The film earned James the Directors Guild of America Award and the MTV Movie Award’s "Best New Filmmaker." Recently, Hoop Dreams was selected for the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, signifying the film’s enduring importance to American film history, and hailed by critic Roger Ebert as "the great American documentary."
James' next documentary, Stevie, won major festival awards at Sundance, Amsterdam, Yamagata and Philadelphia, and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. The acclaimed feature landed on a dozen "Top Ten Films of the Year" lists for 2003. James was also an executive producer, story director, and co-editor of the PBS series, The New Americans, which won two Chicago International Television Festival Golden Hugos, and the prestigious 2004 International Documentary Association Award for Best Limited Series for Television. In 2005, James completed the documentary Reel Paradise, his fourth film to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. James then served as producer and editor of The War Tapes, a documentary comprised of video footage shot by American soldiers in Iraq. The film won the top prize at both the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival, and the inaugural 2006 BritDoc Film Festival.
In 2008, he co-produced and co-directed with Peter Gilbert the acclaimed At the Death House Door, which won the top prize at the Atlanta Film Festival, the Inspiration Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and aired on IFC-TV. At the Death House Dooris James’ fourth film to be officially short-listed for the Academy Award.
James' 2010 documentary No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson had its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival and aired as part of ESPN Films' 2010 International Documentary Association award-winning series 30 for 30. The film was selected for the IDOCS International Documentary Forum in Beijing, and also played at the Cleveland, Full Frame, Dallas, Nashville and Atlanta film festivals, among others, as well as earning James the Best Director award at the Midwest Film Awards. In 2011, No Crossover was selected by the U.S. Department of State for the American Documentary Showcase.
In 2011 James released his sixth film in partnership with Kartemquin, The Interrupters. Marking a return to some of the same Chicago neighborhoods featured in Hoop Dreams, James co-produced the film with acclaimed writer Alex Kotlowitz (There Are No Children Here). The film was his fifth feature to be selected for the Sundance Film Festival, and was a hit on the festival circuit winning a dozen awards including the grand jury prizes at the Sheffield Film Festival, Miami Film Festival, and Minneapolis Film Festival. It won both the IndieWire and Village Voice’s national critics polls as the best documentary of the year, and was listed on over 60 “Best Films of the Year” lists including Time, The New Yorker, The Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and The LA Times among others. James won the two top prizes at the 2012 Cinema Eye Honors – “Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking" & "Best Direction" – and was nominated for the DGA Award (his third DGA nomination). The Interrupters also won the 2012 Independent Spirit Award, and Emmy, and the duPont-Columbia Journalism Award.
James' most recent documentary, Life Itself, about film critic Roger Ebert, premiered to critical acclaim at Sundance and was named the best documentary of the year by over a dozen critics associations, and received the Golden Tomato Award from RottenTomatoes.com as the best reviewed documentary of 2014. It also was awarded best documentary by The Critic’s Choice Awards, The National Board of Review, and The Producers Guild of America.
James’ dramatic films include the theatrical feature Prefontaine (1997), which premiered at Sundance, and cable movies Passing Glory (1999) and Joe and Max (2002), which was nominated for an ESPN Espy Award.
His current projects at Kartemquin include Generation Food, a transmedia collaboration with author Raj Patel which looks at solutions to fixing the broken global food system, and America to Me, a series that follows, in-depth, the stories of a dozen students, representing different races, grade levels, socioeconomic classes and educational tracks within a suburban high school grappling with how to address what is commonly (and now controversially) called a "racial achievement gap."