Uzo (born August 1957) is a Nigerian-American filmmaker and graphic artist. He has made two feature films, Walls & Bridges (1992) and Better Than Ever (1997). After losing the option to the film rights on the novel Mendel's Dwarf, after many years of work, he is currently working on a third film, Sophie's Wish. Early life He is Igbo and was born in Obiaruku, Nigeria, Uzo is the son of a bookseller and a midwife. His mother died during childbirth when he was twelve years old due to poor medical attention due to the expenditure of resources on the Biafran War, after which he and his two siblings were raised solely by his father. He studied graphic design at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, then a master's program in graphic design, at Howard University, Washington, D.C. , and then photography at Brooks Institute of Photography, Santa Barbara, California. His early interest in film was cultivated primarily by films from India, today's Bollywood, that were popular in Nigeria during his youth. Career His production company is called Cold Grey Entertainment. Initially based in Patchogue, New York, he is now based in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, New York. A professional graphic artist, he is the founder of the Devo clothing brand, which has now been phased into a shoe line. While his films deal significantly with race relations, the issue of race is never dealt with on the surface. Uzo does not consider himself much of a writer, and each of his films has been co-written with someone else based on his initial concepts. After writing and rewriting the script, for Walls & Bridges, he hired Michael Edelson, then a film professor at SUNY Stony Brook , and Barbara Gallen as story consultants. He co-wrote the finished screenplay with Alyssa McGuinness. Uzo, Alan Fine, and co-producer Anthony Breccia co-wrote Better Than Ever based on his story, and he had another writer on Mendel's Dwarf, again after agonizing on several drafts of the scripts of his own. Most recently, he has consulted with Kimberly Britt to script his third film, titled Sophie's Wish. Uzo prefers to keep his films simple, straightforward, and unmanipulative, "in the European style." Works Uzo's Walls & Bridges is the story of a white nun Ellen Landress Bowkett who leaves her Order to marry a black painter Mark D. Kennerly who is blinded in a random act of