Burnett grew up in Los Angeles and studied film at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began filming Killer of Sheep while a student, shooting on weekends. The film, completed in 1973 but not publicly screened until 1977, is a collection of vignettes centred on an impoverished African American family in Los Angeles. A 1980 Guggenheim Fellowship allowed Burnett to begin production on his second feature film, My Brother's Wedding (1983), a portrait of a family and its feelings toward the inner city neighbourhood in which it lives. In 1988 Burnett received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, which provided him with the financial support to make To Sleep with Anger (1990), another portrait of an African American family coming to grips with both its past and its present. To Sleep with Anger gained widespread critical acclaim and was Burnett's first film to enjoy a modicum of commercial success. The Glass Shield (1994), about a black cop working with a racist police unit, was Burnett's first major commercial effort, but it enjoyed only limited success. He subsequently turned to television and documentary films and in 1996 made the highly praised Nightjohn, a fictional film about American slaves teaching themselves to read. He followed that with the television movie Selma, Lord, Selma (1999), about the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., and the documentaries Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2003) and Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation (2007).