About

Lauren Greenfield is considered to be one of America’s most acclaimed chroniclers of youth culture. Greenfield’s photographs are a revealing exploration into the daily lives and rituals of women. Her subjects range from the ordinary to the eccentric, from pre-schoolers to post-grads, from would-be models to actresses, athletes, showgirls and sex workers. Through these animated and colorful canvasses, Greenfield exposes the exhibitionistic, hyper-sexualized, and peer-pressured culture within which contemporary women must negotiate their feelings of self-worth.

Named by The New York Times as “America’s foremost visual chronicler of the plutocracy,” Emmy-award-winning filmmaker/photographer Lauren Greenfield is a two-time Directors’ Guild and Writers’ Guild award nominee known for the groundbreaking work she has created on consumerism, youth culture and gender for the past 25 years.  Her documentary films Thin, The Queen of Versailles, Generation Wealth and The Kingmaker, and photography from her monographs, Fast Forward, Girl Culture, Thin and Generation Wealth have been screened, published, and exhibited around the world, as well as collected by cultural institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), J. Paul Getty Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Smithsonian, and the International Center of  Photography.

Following her Emmy-nominated film debut in 2006 with THIN, Greenfield began to direct commercials and continued her feature film work, opening the Sundance Film Festival with The Queen of Versailles which won her the Best Documentary Director Award at the Sundance Film Festival and was named by Vogue as one of the top documentaries of all time.  Her viral ad, #LikeAGirl, swept commercial awards, including a 2015 Emmy, 14 Cannes Lions 2015 (including the Titanium Lion), 7 Clios, 5 Art Directors, 8 pencils at the D & AD Awards, was named 3rd Best Ad of the Decade, earned Greenfield the #1 Director/Most Awarded Director by AdAge (the first woman to top this list) and the Best in Show at the AICP Awards, and has become part of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) permanent collection.  In 2015, Greenfield was also named one of the 2015 Top 10 directors in Adweek’s Most Creative 100 People and by American Photo as one of the 25 most influential photographers working today (American Photo).

Greenfield’s Generation Wealth, garnered her the 2018 Photographer of the Year from the Art Directors Club, The Paris Photography Prize 2018 (PX3), and the Lucie for Best Book Photographer of 2018. The record-setting companion exhibition opened in Los Angeles at the Annenberg Space for Photography on April 2017 and has since traveled to the International Center of Photography (New York City), the Nobel Peace Center (Oslo), the Fotomuseum (The Hague), Deichtorhallen Hamburg, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Copenhagen), and Fotografiska (Stockholm) where it is on view now. The accompanying film, Generation Wealth, opened the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, screened at the Berlinale, SXSW, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and was released worldwide by Amazon Studios. Film Independent awarded Greenfield the Spirit of Independence Award, and the Writers Guild nominated Generation Wealth for Best Documentary screenplay.

Greenfield’s latest documentary film, The Kingmaker (2019), about the former First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, premiered at the Venice Film Festival, followed by Telluride, Toronto, and London, making it the first documentary to play all four festivals. The Kingmaker has garnered a Writers Guild Nomination, three Critics Choice Nominations and the Critics’ Choice honor for the “Most Compelling Living Subject of a Documentary.” It was named one of the “Best Documentaries of 2019” by Variety, Hollywood Reporter, the Boston Globe, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Bay Area critics and has been lauded by critics in the Philippines. The film premiered on Showtime streaming beginning February, 2020.