

"Her blithe willingness to disrobe without shame caused an outburst of censure from viewers," observed The New Yorker's Rebecca Mead.
ACTRESS LENA SERIES
"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." ĭunham on the set of her web series Delusional Downtown DivasĪnother 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. "I didn't go to film school", Dunham explains. 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.

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. While a student at Oberlin College, Dunham produced several independent short films and uploaded them to YouTube.

Career 2000s: Oberlin College and early works The siblings were raised in Brooklyn and spent summers in Salisbury, Connecticut. 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. She attended The New School for a year before transferring to Oberlin College, where she graduated in 2008 with a degree in creative writing. As a teen, Dunham also won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award. ĭunham first 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. The Dunham family are cousins of the Tiffany family, prominent in the jewelry trade. Dunham has described herself as feeling "very culturally Jewish, although that's the biggest cliché for a Jewish woman to say." The works of acclaimed Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai helped her to connect with her Judaism. Her father is Protestant of mostly English ancestry whereas her mother is Jewish. 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 second feature film, Sharp Stick, written and directed by Dunham, was released in 2022. 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. 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 is known as 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. Lena Dunham ( / ˈ l iː n ə ˈ d ʌ n ə m/, born May 13, 1986) is an American writer, director, actress, and producer.
