Griffith was born in La Grange, Oldham County, Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a Confederate Army colonel and Civil War hero. He began his career as a hopeful playwright but met with little success. He then became an actor. Finding his way into the motion picture business, he soon began to direct a huge of work.

Between 1907 and 1913 (the years he directed for the Biograph Company), Griffith produced 450 short films, an enormous number even for this period. This work enabled him to experiment with cross-cutting, camera movement, close-ups, and other methods of spatial and temporal manipulation.

On Griffith's first trip to California, he and his company discovered a little village to film their movies in. This place was known as Hollywood. With this, Biograph was the first company to shoot a movie in Hollywood: In Old California (1910).

Convinced that longer films (then called "features") could be financially viable, his production company became an autonomous production unit partner in Triangle Pictures Corporation with Keystone Studios and Thomas Ince. Through David W. Griffith Corp. he produced was extremely popular but was accused by some of racism. In reaction, Griffith mounted his most ambitious project, , an epic spanning several thousand years of human history. The film was a flop, and the Triangle partnership was dissolved in 1917, so Griffith went to Artcraft (part of Paramount), then to First National (1919-20). At the same time he founded United Artists, together with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks.

Though United Artists survived as a company, Griffith's association with it was short-lived, and while some of his later films did well at the box office, commercial success often eluded him. Features from this period include Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1921) and America (1924). Griffith made only two sound films, Abraham Lincoln (1930) and The Struggle (1931). Neither was successful, and he never made another film.

Griffith has been called the father of film grammar. Few scholars still hold that his "innovations" really began with him, but Griffith was a key figure in establishing the set of codes that have become the universal backbone of film language. He was particularly influential in popularizing "cross-cutting" - using film editing to alternate between different events occurring at the same time - in order to build suspense. That being said, he still used many elements from the "primitive" of movie-making that predated classical Hollywood's continuity system, such as frontal staging, exaggerated gestures, minimal camera movement, and an absence of point of view shots.

Credit for Griffith's cinematic innovations must be shared with his cameraman of many years, Billy Bitzer. In addition, he himself credited the legendary silent star Lillian Gish, who appeared in several of his films, with creating a new

Griffith was a highly controversial figure. Immensely popular at the time of its release, his film , is widely considered responsible for the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. The NAACP attempted to have "The Birth Of A Nation" banned. After that effort failed, they then attempted to have some of the film's scenes censored.

Motion picture legend Charles Chaplin called Griffith "The Teacher Of Us All". This sentiment was widely shared. Filmmakers as diverse as John Ford and Orson Welles have spoken of their respect for the director of Intolerance. Whether or not he actually invented new techniques in film grammar, he seems to have been among the first to understand how these techniques could be used to create an expressive language. In early shorts such as The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) we can see how Griffith's attention to camera placement and lighting en mood and tension. In making Intolerance the director opened up new possibilities for the medium, creating a form that seems to owe more to music than to traditonal narrative.

Griffith was honored on a 10-cent postage stamp by the United States issued May 5, 1975.

In 1953, the Directors Guild of America instituted the D.W. Griffith Award, its Guild's highest honor. Its recipients included Stanley Kubrick, David Lean, John Huston, Woody Allen, Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock and Griffith's friend Cecil B. DeMille. On 15 December 1999, however, DGA President Jack Shea and the DGA National Board - without membership consultation - announced that the award would be renamed the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award because Griffith's film had "helped foster intolerable racial stereotypes". The following living recipients of the award agreed with the guild's decision: Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet and Robert Wise.