Lena Dunham
Lena Dunham is an American writer, director, actress, and producer. She is the creator, writer, and star of the HBO television series Girls, for which she received several Emmy Award nominations and two Golden Globe Awards. Dunham also directed several episodes of Girls and became the first woman to win the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Comedy Series. She started her career writing, directing, and starring in her semi-autobiographical independent film Tiny Furniture, for which she won an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. She has since written and directed the 2022 films Sharp Stick and Catherine Called Birdy. In 2025, she created the Netflix series Too Much starring Megan Stalter.
In 2013, Dunham was included in the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2014, Dunham released her first book, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned". In 2015, along with Girls showrunner Jenni Konner, Dunham created the publication Lenny Letter, a feminist online newsletter. The publication ran for three years before its discontinuation in late 2018.
Dunham briefly appeared in films such as Supporting Characters and This Is 40, and Happy Christmas. She voiced Mary in the 2016 film My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. On television, aside from Girls, she has played guest roles in Scandal and The Simpsons. In 2017, she portrayed Valerie Solanas in American Horror Story: Cult.
Dunham's work, as well as her outspoken presence on social media and in interviews, have attracted significant controversy, praise, criticism, and media scrutiny throughout her career.
Early life and education
Dunham was born in New York City. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter, and her mother, Laurie Simmons, is an artist and photographer, and a member of The Pictures Generation, known for her use of dolls and dollhouse furniture in her photographs of setup interior scenes. Her father is Protestant of mostly English ancestry and is a descendant of Stephanus van Cortlandt, the first native-born mayor of New York City. Her mother is Jewish. Dunham has described herself as feeling "very culturally Jewish, although that's the biggest cliché for a Jewish woman to say." The Modern Hebrew poetry of Yehuda Amichai helped her to connect with her Judaism.Dunham attended Friends Seminary before transferring in seventh grade to Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, where she met Tiny Furniture actress and future Girls co-star Jemima Kirke. As a teen, Dunham also won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award. She attended The New School for a year before transferring to Oberlin College, where she graduated in 2008 with a degree in creative writing.
She has a younger sibling, Cyrus who appeared in Dunham's first film, Creative Nonfiction, and starred in her second film, Tiny Furniture. The siblings were raised in Brooklyn and spent summers in Salisbury, Connecticut.
Career
2000s: Oberlin College and early works
While a student at Oberlin College, Dunham produced several independent short films and uploaded them to YouTube. Many of her early films dealt with themes of sexual enlightenment and were produced in a mumblecore filmmaking style, a dialogue-heavy style in which young people talk about their personal relationships. In 2006, she produced Pressure, in which a girl and two friends talk about experiencing an orgasm for the first time, which makes Dunham's character feel pressured to do so as well. "I didn't go to film school", Dunham explains. "Instead I went to liberal arts school and self-imposed a curriculum of creating tiny flawed video sketches, brief meditations on comic conundrums, and slapping them on the Internet."Another early film, entitled The Fountain, which depicted her in a bikini brushing her teeth in the public fountain at Oberlin College, went viral on YouTube. "Her blithe willingness to disrobe without shame caused an outburst of censure from viewers," observed The New Yorker Rebecca Mead. Dunham was shocked by the backlash and decided to take the video down:
Pressures, Open the Door, Hooker on Campus, and The Fountain were released as DVD extras with Tiny Furniture. In 2007, Dunham starred in a ten-episode web series for Nerve.com entitled Tight Shots, described by The New York Times Magazine Virginia Heffernan as "a daffy serial about kids trying to make a movie and be artsy and have tons of sex."
In 2009, Dunham created the Index Magazine web series, Delusional Downtown Divas, which satirized the New York City art scene. The production was unpaid, so Dunham and her friends "pooled their money from babysitting and art-assistant gigs and borrowed some camera gear." Also in 2009, Dunham premiered Creative Nonfiction — a comedy where she plays Ella, a college student struggling to complete a screenplay — at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. She was initially rejected by the festival the year before; she re-edited and successfully resubmitted the film.
2010–11: Breakthrough with ''Tiny Furniture''
Dunham had a career breakthrough with her semi-autobiographical 2010 feature film Tiny Furniture; the film won Best Narrative Feature at South by Southwest Music and Media Conference, and subsequently screened at such festivals as Maryland Film Festival. Dunham plays the lead role of Aura. Laurie Simmons plays Aura's mother, and Dunham's real-life sibling Cyrus plays Aura's on-screen sibling. For her work on Tiny Furniture, Dunham also won an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay.The success of Tiny Furniture earned Dunham a blind script deal at HBO. The network set Dunham up with veteran showrunner Jennifer Konner. Konner told Vulture's Jada Yuan that she got involved with Dunham because she was an obsessive Tiny Furniture fan:
Dunham's star also rose when she was profiled by David Carr in The New York Times; he was later credited with introducing her to Judd Apatow. Apatow watched Tiny Furniture, and was surprised Dunham had also written and directed the film. "I emailed her and told her I thought it was great", Apatow told The Hollywood Reporter. "It turned out she was in the middle of negotiating a deal to develop a show for HBO and that her partner was Jenni Konner, whom I had worked with on Undeclared and a bunch of other projects. They asked me if I wanted to be a part of it, and I was thrilled to jump in."
2012–17: Mainstream success with ''Girls'' and first book
Dunham's television series, Girls, was greenlit by HBO in early 2011. Three episodes were screened to positive responses at the 2012 South by Southwest Festival. The series follows Hannah Horvath, a 20-something writer struggling to get by in New York City. Some of the struggles facing Dunham's character Hannah—including being cut off financially from her parents, becoming a writer and making unfortunate decisions—are inspired by Dunham's real-life experiences.Dunham said Girls reflects a part of the population not portrayed in the 1998 HBO series Sex and the City. "Gossip Girl was teens duking it out on the Upper East Side and Sex and the City was women who figured out work and friends and now want to nail romance and family life. There was this 'hole-in-between' space that hadn't really been addressed," she said. The pilot intentionally references Sex and the City, as producers wanted to make it clear that the driving force behind Girls is that the characters were inspired by the former HBO series and moved to New York to pursue their dreams. Dunham herself says she "revere that show just as much as any girl of my generation".
The first season premiered on HBO on April 15, 2012, and received critical acclaim. The New York Times applauded the series, writing that "Girls may be the millennial generation's rebuttal to Sex and the City, but the first season was at times as cruelly insightful and bleakly funny as Louie on FX or Curb Your Enthusiasm on HBO." James Poniewozik from Time had high praise for the series, calling it "raw, audacious, nuanced and richly, often excruciatingly funny". Despite the acclaim, the series also generated criticism over its lack of racial representation and Dunham's frequent on-screen nudity.
The first season garnered Dunham four Emmy Award nominations for her roles in acting, writing, and directing the series, as well as two Golden Globe Awards for Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy and Best Actress – Television Series Musical or Comedy. In February 2013, Dunham became the first woman to win a Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Comedy Series for her work on Girls.
Girls was renewed for a second season in April 2012, before the first season had finished airing. The first-season finale drew over one million viewers. The second season of Girls continued to receive critical acclaim. David Wiegland of the San Francisco Chronicle said: "The entire constellation of impetuous, ambitious, determined and insecure young urbanites in Girls is realigning in the new season, but at no point in the four episodes sent to critics for review do you feel that any of it is artificial". Verne Gay of Newsday said: "Sharper, smarter, more richly layered, detailed and acted". Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly felt that "As bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as it was in its first season, Girls may now be even spunkier, funnier, and riskier". The second season ran on HBO from January 2013 to March 2013, with third and fourth seasons subsequently being renewed. The third season of Girls premiered in January 2014 with over one million viewers. The following month, Dunham hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live with musical guest The National.
File:Avy Kaufman and Lena Dunham.jpg|thumb|left|Dunham with Avy Kaufman at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival
In late 2012, Dunham signed a $3.5 million deal with Random House to publish her first book. The book, an essay collection called Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned", was published in September 2014. It reached number two on The New York Times Best Seller list in October 2014. On January 5, 2015, days before the premiere of the fourth season, Girls was renewed for a fifth season, despite dwindling viewership. That year, Dunham launched A Casual Romance Productions, a production company to develop television and film projects. The company produced It's Me Hilary: The Man Who Drew Eloise. On February 20, 2015, it was reported that Dunham had been cast in a guest role in an episode of the ABC drama series Scandal, which aired March 19, 2015.
In September 2015, Dunham stated that the sixth season of Girls was likely to be the last. This was later confirmed by HBO. In 2016, Dunham appeared in her mother's film, My Art, which had its world premiere at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival. She also voiced Mary in My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, a 2016 American animated teen comedy drama film directed by Dash Shaw. It was selected to be screened in the Vanguard section at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival. Dunham also filmed scenes for the film Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, but they were cut from the final film. In 2017, Dunham portrayed Valerie Solanas, the real-life radical feminist and SCUM Manifesto author who attempted to murder Andy Warhol in the late 1960s, in American Horror Story: Cult. Girls sixth and final season concluded on April 16, 2017, leaving a total of 62 episodes in the series.