Don Letts

Don Letts is a British film director, DJ and musician whose work in film and music runs from the late 1970s into the new millennium. His work has been exhibited at The Kitchen in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art and the NFT in London, and honored at Brooklyn's BAM festival and the Milan Film Festival.

Born in London in 1956, he ran the clothing store Acme Attractions in the mid-1970s, playing dub reggae all day. When punk arrived, he DJed at The Roxy in Covent Garden and mixed dub and reggae into his sets. He is credited with introducing those sounds to the London punk scene, which influenced the Clash and other bands. He made his first film, The Punk Rock Movie (1978), on Super 8.

He went on to direct music videos for the Clash, Musical Youth, the Psychedelic Furs, Fun Boy Three, the Pretenders and Elvis Costello, as well as documentaries including Dancehall Queen (co-directed with Rick Elgood) and The Clash: Westway to the World, which won a Grammy in 2003. Rebel Dread (2022) is a documentary about his own story.

In 1984 he co-founded Big Audio Dynamite with Mick Jones, and later formed Screaming Target. He has presented a weekly show on BBC Radio 6 Music, written the autobiography Culture Clash: Dread Meets Punk Rockers, and released his debut studio album, Outta Sync, in 2023. In 2013 he received a BASCA Gold Badge of Merit, and in 2022 an honorary doctorate from the University of Nottingham.