Lauren Greenfield

Lauren Greenfield (born 1966) is an American artist, documentary photographer, and documentary filmmaker.

She has published four photographic monographs, directed four documentary features, produced four traveling exhibitions, and published in magazines throughout the world.

Greenfield was born on June 28, 1966, in Boston, Massachusetts, to psychologist Patricia Marks Greenfield and physician Sheldon Greenfield.

She has a younger brother, film producer Matthew Greenfield.

She attended Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in Santa Monica.

From September 1985 to May 1986, while still an undergraduate at Harvard, Greenfield traveled around the world on a nine-month-long program created by the International Honors Program, entitled "Film Study and Anthropology".

This experience exposed her to anthropological and documentary filmmaking in France, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, India, Australia, and Japan.

Greenfield graduated from Harvard University in 1987 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in visual and environmental studies.

While an undergraduate, she studied overseas in several countries with the International Honors Program, a division of SIT Study Abroad.

Her senior thesis photography project on the French aristocracy was called "Survivors of the French Revolution".

Greenfield's undergraduate thesis helped kick start her career as an intern for National Geographic Magazine.

In 1988, she co-directed a 25-minute film, Once You're In, about Irish illegal immigrants living in Boston.

Greenfield subsequently directed THIN, a feature-length documentary for HBO, and published an accompanying book with the same title.

A subsequent grant from National Geographic provided financial support toward her debut monograph, "Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood" (Knopf 1997).

Five years after the release of "Fast Forward", Greenfield produced a second major body of work about the self-esteem crisis amongst American women, entitled "Girl Culture".

THIN was selected for competition at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006.

In September 2006, Greenfield received the prestigious Grierson Award for best documentary shown at the BFI London Film Festival.

It also won the Grand Jury Prize at the Independent Film Festival of Boston, the Newport International Film Festival, and the Jackson Hole Film Festival.

Greenfield received a 2007 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing For Nonfiction Programming for her work on THIN.

The short also won the Audience Award for Best Short Film at the AFI Film Festival 2007, the Michael Moore Award for Best Documentary Film at the 2008 Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Gold Plaque, Documentary:Social/Political from The Hugo Television Awards 2008, and Best Documentary Short at Kids First Film Festival 2008.

"kids + money" was also selected into the Official Shorts Program at the Sundance Film Festival (January 2008).

The 32-minute film includes interviews with Los Angeles teenagers on the subject of money and how it affects their lives.

HBO licensed North American broadcast rights to "kids + money", and the film has been distributed internationally.

Greenfield's follow-up short film, kids + money, was selected as one of the top five nonfiction shorts in the world by Cinema Eye Honors 2009.

In February 2011, the Annenberg Space for Photography commissioned Greenfield to direct a short documentary film, "Beauty CULTure", to serve as the central focus of this record-setting "Beauty CULTure" exhibition (May–November 2011).

Shot in Paris, New York and Los Angeles, the 30-minute film is a critical examination of "beauty in popular culture, the narrowing definition of beauty in contemporary society, and the influence of media messages on the female body image".

In a 2012 interview with Sara Melson (for Harvardwood.com), Greenfield was quoted as saying "We watched many indigenous films, and we met with amazing directors. It was on that trip that I realized my calling. I wasn't sure if it would be sociology, film, photography, or anthropology, but looking at culture was my calling. When I got back to Harvard, I switched my major from Social Studies to Visual Studies. I soon realized that theory wasn't my medium, and I moved toward filmmaking and photography."

At Harvard, Greenfield continued her filmmaking studies under the tutelage of established documentary filmmaker Robb Moss.

In January 2012 Greenfield received the Sundance Film Festival's Directing Award, US Documentary 2012 for her documentary feature film, entitled The Queen of Versailles, which was released theatrically in 2012.

Previously, The Queen of Versailles was selected for the U.S. Documentary Competition at the Sundance Film Festival 2012 (The world premieres of 16 American documentary films).

The Queen of Versailles was further honored by being selected to be the opening night documentary film for the Sundance Film Festival.

The film was acquired by Magnolia Pictures on the first day of the festival.

Also in 2012, she was awarded the Grand Jury Prize from the Brisbane International Film Festival, a second Best Director Award from the RiverRun Film Festival, the Special Jury Documentary Feature prize from the deadCenter Film Festival.

On October 22, 2012, The Queen of Versailles was nominated for Best Documentary Film, 2012 by the International Documentary Association (IDA).

According to PBS/POV, The Queen of Versailles was ranked #2 of the Top 10 Documentaries of 2012, based on awards, nominations and other ranking criteria.

In January 2013, Greenfield was nominated by the Directors Guild of America (DGA) for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentaries for the year 2012.

In March 2014, Greenfield won a lawsuit brought by the film's main subject David Siegel.

Siegel claimed Greenfield had not obtained a proper release from the subjects of the film, in particular David Siegel and Westgate Resorts.

An IFTA arbitrator supported Greenfield's position and also awarded her $750,000 for legal fees.

In 2020, fiction author Elle Nash wrote a short story about THIN on HARSH Lit Mag.