Lauren Greenfield

Lauren Greenfield is an American artist, documentary photographer, and filmmaker. She has published many monographs and directed many documentaries. She was born on the 28th of June, 1966 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Patricia Marks Greenfield, is a psychologist, and her father, Sheldon Greenfield, is a physician. She has a younger brother named ‘Matthew Greenfield.’ She is married to Frank Evers and has two sons, Noah and Gabriel. She is currently a resident of Venice, California. Greenfield majored and graduated in Visual and environmental studies from Harvard University in 1987. Her senior thesis Project in photography was called ’Survivors of the French revolution’ and was based on the French aristocracy.

Her thesis got her an internship for National Geographic Magazine. Subsequently, she got a grant from National Geographic, providing financial support towards her debut monograph called ‘Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood.’ She went on to publish a monograph entitled ‘Girl Culture’ about the self-esteem crisis among American women five years later. She has been published in International publications like; NewYork, The New Yorker, Stern, Marie Claire, Time, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and so much more.

When she was still a student at Harvard, Greenfield traveled around the globe on a nine-month-long International Honors Program, called ‘Film Study and Anthropology’. This program exposed her to different types of film making in France, India, Yogoslavia, Hungary, Japan, and Austria. This made her switch her major from social studies to Visual studies. She realized that theory wasn’t her medium and leaned towards filmmaking and photography. She co-directed a 25-minute film called ‘Once You’re In’ about Irish illegal immigrants in 1988.

She directed a documentary called ‘Thin’ for HBO and published a book with the same title. This documentary was selected for competition at the ‘Sundance Film Festival’ in 2006. Greenfield received the ‘Grierson Award’ for the best documentary shown at the BFI London Film Festival in 2006. She received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Direction for Nonfiction Programming in 2007, for her work in the film ‘Thin’. 

In 2009, Greenfield’s short film ‘kids + money’ was selected as one of the five nonfiction films in the world by cinema eye honors. The film won the ‘Audience Award’ for the Best short film at the AFI film festival and many more awards. The thirty-two-minute film includes interviews with Los Angeles teens on the subject of money. The film has been released internationally.

‘Generation Wealth’ is a film by Greenfield, which was selected to be the opening film at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018. The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it was featured in the Panorama program. The film was distributed by Amazon Studios and released in US theatres on July 20, 2018. For this film, Greenfield was nominated for the Writers Guild of America awards for the best documentary screenplay.