Steven Spielberg is a principal partner of DreamWorks Studios. One of the industry’s most successful and influential filmmakers, Spielberg has directed, produced, or executive produced some of the top-grossing films of all time, including “Jurassic Park” and “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.” Among his myriad honors, he is a three-time Academy Award® winner, earning two Oscars® for Best Director and Best Picture for “Schindler’s List,” and a third Oscar® for Best Director for “Saving Private Ryan.”

A DreamWorks/Paramount co-production, the critically acclaimed World War II drama “Saving Private Ryan,” starring Tom Hanks, was the highest-grossing release (domestically) of 1998. It was also one of the year’s most honored films, earning five Oscars®, including the one for Spielberg as Best Director, as well as two Golden Globe Awards for Best Picture (Drama) and Best Director. Spielberg was also recognized by his peers with a Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award, and shared with the film’s other producers in the Producers Guild of America’s (PGA) Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Theatrical Motion Picture Producer of the Year. That year, the PGA also presented Spielberg with the prestigious Milestone Award for his historic contribution to the motion picture industry.

“Saving Private Ryan” also won Best Picture honors from the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, British and Broadcast Film Critics Associations, with the Los Angeles, Toronto and Broadcast Film Critics also naming Spielberg Best Director.

In 1994, Spielberg won two Academy Awards®, for Best Director and Best Picture, for the internationally lauded “Schindler’s List,” which received a total of seven Oscars®. The film also collected Best Picture honors from the major critics organizations, in addition to seven BAFTA Awards, including two for Spielberg. He also won the Golden Globe Award and received his second DGA Award.

Spielberg won his first DGA Award for his work on “The Color Purple.” He has also been honored with Academy Award® nominations for Best Director for “Munich,” “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Additionally, he earned DGA Award nominations for those films, as well as “Empire of the Sun,” “Jaws” and “Amistad.” With ten in all, Spielberg has received more DGA Award nominations than any director in history, and, in 2000, he received the DGA’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He is also the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Kennedy Center Honor, and the Liberty Medal from the Constitution Center, as well as many honors here and internationally.

Spielberg most recently wrapped principal photography on the 3D motion capture film “The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn” starring Jamie Bell and Daniel Craig. Produced by Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and Kathleen Kennedy, “Tintin” is the first of the 3D motion capture films based on the iconic character created by Georges Remi, better known to the world by his pen name “Hergé.” It is now in its extensive post-principal photography phase and is due for release in 2011. Spielberg’s other recent films include 2008’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” which has grossed over $780 million worldwide. In the summer of 2007, he executive produced “Transformers,” a co-production of DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures. It grossed over $708 million worldwide. The second “Transformers” film “Transformers: The Revenge of the Fallen” which he also executive-produced grossed $835 million in 2009.

In 2006, Spielberg produced two films with director/producer Clint Eastwood - “Flags of Our Fathers,” nominated for two Academy Awards, and its companion film, “Letters From Iwo Jima,” which was nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture. In 2005, Spielberg directed two films - “War of the Worlds” and “Munich” - and was a producer on, “Memoirs of a Geisha.” “War of the Worlds” starred Tom Cruise and was a contemporary retelling of H.G. Wells’ classic futuristic novel. “Munich,” a historical thriller set in the aftermath of the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, earned five Academy Award® nominations including Best Picture and Best Director for Spielberg. The Universal/DreamWorks co-production starred Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, and Geoffrey Rush. “Memoirs of a Geisha,” directed by Rob Marshall and based on the best-selling book by Arthur Golden won three Oscars® for Best Cinematography, Art Direction and Costume Design. Spielberg also wrote, directed and produced “A.I.,” which was realized from the vision of the late Stanley Kubrick. In 2000, Spielberg won the Stanley Kubrick Brittania Award for Excellence in Film, presented by BAFTA - Los Angeles.

Born on December 18, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Spielberg was raised in the suburbs of Haddonfield, New Jersey and Scottsdale, Arizona. He started making amateur films while still in his teens, later studying film at California State University, Long Beach. In 1969, his 22-minute short “Amblin” was shown at the Atlanta Film Festival, which led to his becoming the youngest director ever to be signed to a long-term deal with a major Hollywood studio.

Four years later, he directed the suspenseful telefilm “Duel,” which garnered both critical and audience attention. He made his feature film directorial debut on “The Sugarland Express” from a screenplay he co-wrote. His other earlier film credits as director include “Always,” “Hook,” and the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” sequels “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

In 1984, Spielberg formed his own production company, Amblin Entertainment. Under the Amblin banner, he has served as producer or executive producer on more than a dozen films, including such successes as “Gremlins,” “Goonies,” “Back to the Future I, II, and III,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” “An American Tail,” “The Land Before Time,” “The Flintstones,” “Casper,” “Twister,” “The Mask of Zorro,” “Men in Black” and “Men in Black II.” Amblin Entertainment also produced the hit series “ER” with Warner Bros. TV.

Spielberg’s other TV endeavors include executive producing with Tom Hanks the award-winning miniseries “Band of Brothers” set in the European theater of operations for HBO and DreamWorks Television. Based on the book of the same name by the late Stephen Ambrose, the fact-based World War II project won both Emmy and Golden Globe Awards for Best Miniseries. In March 2010, the new miniseries “The Pacific” will debut on HBO. It too is executive produced by Spielberg and Tom Hanks for DreamWorks TV and HBO. This time, it will present the Pacific theater of operations in WWII. In 2002 the Emmy winner for Best Miniseries was “Taken” which Spielberg executive produced for DreamWorks Television and The Sci-Fi Channel. In 2005, Spielberg and DreamWorks Television partnered with TNT to executive produce the 12-hour limited series “Into the West” which followed two multi-generational American and Native American families with each telling the dramatic stories of the development of the West from their distinct points of view. He is currently an executive producer, along with DreamWorks Television, on the hit series “The United States of Tara” which airs on Showtime. Its star Toni Collette won the Emmy Award for Best Actress. The comedy was written by Academy Award winner Diablo Cody (Juno), and also stars Jon Corbett.

Spielberg has also devoted his time and resources to many philanthropic causes. The impact of his experience making “Schindler’s List,” led him to establish the Righteous Persons Foundation using all his profits from the film. He also founded Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which has recorded more than 52,000 Holocaust survivor testimonies. Spielberg executive produced “The Last Days,” the Shoah Foundation’s third documentary, which won the Academy Award® in 1999 for Best Documentary Feature. In 2005, the Foundation’s repository of testimonies were transferred to the University of Southern California. The new USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education is dedicated to research and scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. In addition, Spielberg is the Chairman Emeritus of the Starlight Children’s Foundation, which combines the efforts of pediatric health care, technology and entertainment to empower seriously ill children and their families.