Lena Dunham

Lena Dunham (born May 13, 1986) is an American writer, director, actress, and producer.

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:

"There were just pages of YouTube comments about how fat I was, or how not fat I was,' Dunham said. 'I didn't want you to Google me and the first thing you see is a debate about whether my breasts are misshapen.'"

Pressures (2006), Open the Door (2007), Hooker on Campus (2007), and The Fountain (2007) 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."

She attended The New School for a year before transferring to Oberlin College, where she graduated in 2008 with a degree in creative writing.

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."

Prior to Girls, Dunham wrote, directed, and starred in the semi-autobiographical independent film Tiny Furniture (2010), for which she won an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay.

Her second feature film, Sharp Stick, written and directed by Dunham, was released in 2022.

Her third film, Catherine Called Birdy, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12, 2022.

It was released in a limited release on September 23, 2022, by Amazon Studios, prior to streaming on Prime Video on October 7, 2022.''

She is the creator, writer, and star of the HBO television series Girls (2012–2017), 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.

Dunham briefly appeared in films such as Supporting Characters and This Is 40 (both 2012) and Happy Christmas (2014).

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".

She has a younger sibling, Cyrus, a 2014 graduate of Brown University, 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.

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 dialog-heavy style in which young people talk about their personal relationships.

In 2015, along with Girls showrunner Jenni Konner, Dunham created the publication Lenny Letter, a feminist online newsletter.

On television, aside from Girls, she has played guest roles in Scandal and The Simpsons (both 2015).

She voiced Mary in the 2016 film My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.

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.

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; whereas 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.

The Dunham family are cousins of the Tiffany family, prominent in the jewelry trade.

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.

The publication ran for three years before folding in late 2018.