Steven Andrew Soderbergh is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor. A pioneer of modern independent cinema, Soderbergh later drew acclaim for formally inventive films made within the studio system.
Soderbergh's directorial breakthrough, the indie drama Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), lifted him into the public spotlight as a notable presence in the film industry. At 26, Soderbergh became the youngest solo director to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and the film garnered worldwide commercial success, as well as numerous accolades. His next five films, including the critically lauded King of the Hill (1993), found limited commercial success. He pivoted into more mainstream fare with the crime comedy Out of Sight (1998), the biopic Erin Brockovich (2000) and the crime drama Traffic (2000), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director.
Soderbergh found further popular and critical success with the Ocean's trilogy and film franchise (2001–18), Che (2008), The Informant! (2009), Contagion (2011), Haywire (2011), the Magic Mike trilogy (2012–23), Side Effects (2013), Behind the Candelabra (2013), Logan Lucky (2017), Unsane (2018), Let Them All Talk (2020), No Sudden Move (2021), Kimi (2022), Presence (2024), and Black Bag (2025). His film career spans a multitude of genres but his specialties are psychological, crime, and heist films. His films have grossed over US$2.2 billion worldwide and garnered fourteen Academy Award nominations, winning five.
Soderbergh's films often revolve around familiar concepts which are regularly used for big-budget Hollywood movies, but he routinely employs an avant-garde arthouse approach. They center on themes of shifting personal identities, vengeance, sexuality, morality, and the human condition. His feature films are often distinctive in the realm of cinematography as a result of his having been influenced by avant-garde cinema, coupled with his use of unconventional film and camera formats. Many of Soderbergh's films are anchored by multi-dimensional storylines with plot twists, nonlinear storytelling, experimental sequencing, suspenseful soundscapes, and third-person vantage points.
