5) Ernest Dickerson
Ernest Dickerson boasts an impressive list of cinematography credits, with the most notable among these being his early collaborations with Spike Lee. Dickerson was Lee’s director of photography for his formative feature films, from She’s Gotta Have It, to Do the Right Thing, up to Malcolm X. The look of these films was one of the defining features of Lee’s innovative and striking new style. He was also the cinematographer on Eddie Murphy Raw.
His feature directing career got off to a promising start in 1992 with the release of Juice starring Tupac, but his subsequent directorial efforts were met with negative responses. A bigger move than going from cinematographer to director seems to be when he switched from directing features to directing television, leading episodes of The Wire in 2003 and onward. Today, he’s a frequent director of The Walking Dead and did numerous episodes of Dexter and Treme over the past few years.
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