Alfonso Cuarón Orozco (US: /kwɑːˈroʊn/ kwah-ROHN, Spanish: [alˈfõn.so kwaˈɾõn] (listen); born 28 November 1961) is a Mexican filmmaker. He is known for directing films in a variety of genres, including the family drama A Little Princess (1995), the romantic drama Great Expectations (1998), the coming of age road film Y tu mamá también (2001), the fantasy film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), science fiction films such as Children of Men (2006) and Gravity (2013) and the semi-autobiographical drama Roma (2018); he directed the 2009 short I Am Autism.
Cuarón has received 10 Academy Award nominations, winning four including Best Director for Gravity and Roma, Best Film Editing for Gravity, and Best Cinematography for Roma. He is the first Mexico-born filmmaker to win the Best Director award, and one of only four people to have been nominated for Academy Awards in six different categories.
Cuarón was born in Mexico City, the son of Alfredo Cuarón, a doctor specializing in nuclear medicine, and Cristina Orozco, a pharmaceutical biochemist. He has two brothers; Carlos, also a filmmaker, and Alfredo, a conservation biologist.[citation needed] Cuarón studied philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and filmmaking at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos, a school within the same university. There he met the director Carlos Marcovich and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and they made what would be his first short film, Vengeance Is Mine.[citation needed]

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