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Lauren Greenfield is an American artist, documentary photographer, and documentary filmmaker. She has published three monographs of her photographic work, directed two (HBO) documentary films, and has been featured in a variety of magazines. Her photographs generally deal with issues relating to youth culture, gender identity, body image, eating disorders, and the influence of popular culture on how we live. In the May/June 2003 issue of American Photo Magazine, she was named one of the "The 25 most important photographers now". In April 2005, she shared the third spot of the "100 Most Important People in Photography", again in American Photo Magazine. In March 2009, she was named one of eight LA-based Masters of Photography for the inaugural show at the new Annenberg Center for Photography, “L8S ANG3LES”. In June 2010, her (Girl Culture) work will be featured in a major photographic exhibition at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, called "Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography Since the Sixties", along with Leonard Freed (Black in White America), Philip Jones Griffiths (Vietnam Inc.), W. Eugene Smith (Minamata), Susan Meiselas (Nicaragua: June 1978-July 1979), Mary Ellen Mark (Streetwise), Larry Towell (The Mennonites), Sebastião Salgado (Migrations), and James Nachtwey ("The Sacrifice").

Greenfield graduated from Harvard in 1987 with a B.A., majoring in Visual Environmental Studies. Her Senior Thesis project on the French Aristocracy was called "Survivors of the French Revolution". This work helped kickstart her career as an intern for National Geographic Magazine. A subsequent grant from National Geographic helped her with 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 tour-de-force project about the self-esteem crisis amongst American women, entitled "Girl Culture", which has been reprinted five times. Alongside her books, "Fast Forward","Girl Culture", and "THIN", Greenfield produced three large-scale traveling exhibitions with the same names, which have been seen by more than a million viewers in museums around the world.

Her photography, including entire bodies of work like "Girl Culture" and "Fast Forward", is in many major collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the International Center of Photography, the Center for Creative Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the Harvard University Archive, the Smith College Museum of Art, the Clinton Library, and the French Ministry of Culture. She is represented by the Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York and the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles.

Since starting her career in 1991, her photographs have been regularly published in magazines including the New York Times Magazine, Time, Vanity Fair, People, National Geographic, Stern, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, ELLE, Harper's, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, The Guardian, and The Sunday Times Magazine. She has received many photography awards and grants, including the National Geographic Grant, the ICP Infinity Award for Young Photographer (1996), a Hasselblad Foundation Grant, the NPPA Community Awareness Award, and the People's Choice Award at the Moscow Biennial.

FILMOGRAPHY

Ms. Greenfield has also directed a feature-length documentary for HBO entitled Thin , and has published an accompanying book with the same title. This feature documentary film was selected for the Competition at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006. In September 2006, Greenfield received the prestigious John Grierson Award for director of the best feature-length documentary at the London Film Festival 2006. This film also picked up the Grand Jury Prize at the Independent Film Festival of Boston, the Newport International Film Festival, and the Jackson Hole Film Festival. She also received an 2007 EMMY nomination for Best Director of Non-Fiction programming for the film, Thin .

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. 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 to major broadcasters and cable networks internationally.

Ms. Greenfield is shooting a new documentary feature film, subject unknown.

In addition to feature and short length video, Greenfield has also produced a number of multimedia pieces featuring video, still images and audio. Notable amongst these are:

• "Fashion Show" (2010) multimedia with photo, video and audio
• "Foreclosure: Death of the American Dream" (2009) - multimedia with photo, video and audio
• "Ben Gals" (2008) - multimedia with photo and audio
• "Teen Spa" (2007) - multimedia with photo and audio
• "Jackie Warner" (2007) - multimedia with photo, video and audio
• "Teen Lipo" (2006) - multimedia with photo and audio

Ms. Greenfield is represented by Chelsea Pictures, Stockland Martel, and INSTITUTE (Institute for Artist Management). She was a member of the VII Photo Agency from 2002 to 2009. She is married to Frank Evers (Founder/CEO, INSTITUTE and the Co-Chair/Co-Founder of the New York Photo Festival), with whom she has two sons, and they reside in Venice, California.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Lauren Greenfield", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0