Lena Dunham

Early life

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 and of mostly English ancestry, and 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 Dunham family are cousins of the Tiffany family, prominent in the jewelry trade.

Dunham attended 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 sister, Grace, a 2014 graduate of Brown University, who appeared in Dunham's first film, Creative Nonfiction, and starred in her second film, Tiny Furniture. The sisters were raised in Brooklyn and spent summers in Salisbury, Connecticut.

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. 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's 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, 2010.

In 2007, Dunham starred in a ten-episode web series for Nerve.com entitled Tight Shots, described by The New York Times Magazine's 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 it and successfully resubmitted the film.

Tiny Furniture

Dunham had a career breakthrough with her semiautobiographic 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 (Lena Dunham's real-life mother) plays Aura's mother, and Lena's real-life sister Grace plays Aura's on-screen sister.

For her work on Tiny Furniture, Dunham also won an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay.

Girls

The success of Tiny Furniture earned Dunham a blind script deal at HBO. Dunham's star was also raised considerably when she was profiled by David Carr in The New York Times; he later was credited for introducing her to Judd Apatow. The network set Dunham up with veteran show runner Jennifer Konner. Konner told Vulture's Jada Yuan that she got involved with Dunham because she was an obsessive Tiny Furniture fan:

I got a copy of Tiny Furniture from [HBO president] Sue Naegle. Actually, [New Girl creator] Liz Meriwether told me about it and said, 'Oh, there's this great movie. This girl, she's 23, she wrote, directed, and starred in it; she's in her underwear the whole time.' And I was like, 'I really don't want to see that.' And then she was like, 'Oh, trust me, it's great.' So Sue gave it to me just because she had it...I used to, like, give out copies of the movie. But I'd just broken up with my writing partner and couldn't be less interested in the idea of supervising anybody. I really was like, "I'm going to find my voice, and be on my own." And then they called me and they were like, 'Oh, the Tiny Furniture girl is doing a show, do you want to supervise her?' And I was like, 'Yes! One million percent. Sign me up. Totally on board.'

Apatow 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."

Dunham's television series Girls was greenlit by HBO in early 2011. Three episodes were screened to positive response at the 2012 South by Southwest Festival.

The first season premiered April 15, 2012, and has garnered Dunham four Emmy nominations for her roles in acting, writing, and directing the series and two Golden Globe wins for Best Comedy Series for Girls and for herself in Best Lead Actress in a Comedy or Musical Series.

In February 2013, she became the first woman to win a Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Comedy Series for her work on Girls. In January 2015, Girls was renewed for a fifth season. In September 2015, Dunham stated that season 6 of Girls will most likely be the last season for the show. This was confirmed by HBO on January 6, 2016.

Racial controversy

The premiere of the Girls pilot was met with criticism regarding the all-white main cast in the otherwise culturally diverse setting of New York City (the only black actors in the pilot were a homeless man and a taxi driver, and the only Asian actress had the sole trait of being good at Photoshop). Agreeing that there is a lack of racial diversity on Girls, a comment from The Huffington Post argued that the issue is the industry as a whole.

Lesley Arfin, a writer for the show, responded sarcastically to the controversy with the tweeted comment about a movie that highlights an African-American girl's rise from incestuous sexual abuse while living in Harlem: "What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME." Arfin later deleted the comment following criticism on social media claiming her tweet was racist.

Dunham spoke publicly about the issues on several occasions. In an interview with IndieWire, she said:

I am a half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs. Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting. If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African-American, I feel like — not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn't able to speak to. I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me. And only later did I realize that it was four white girls. As much as I can say it was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, 'I hear this and I want to respond to it.' And this is a hard issue to speak to because all I want to do is sound sensitive and not say anything that will horrify anyone or make them feel more isolated, but I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can't speak to accurately.

Donald Glover guest starred as Sandy, a black Republican and Hannah's love interest, in the first two episodes of season two, which was criticized as tokenism in response to the initial backlash from the first season.

Not That Kind of Girl

Dunham signed a $3.5 million deal in 2012 with Random House to publish her first book. Her essay collection, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned", was published in September 2014, and reached #2 on The New York Times Best Seller list on October 19.

Molestation controversies

In the book, Dunham wrote about being sexually assaulted by an Oberlin College classmate, which resulted in controversy regarding the accuracy of her account and a case of mistaken identity when a former Oberlin College student named Barry (the pseudonym used for Dunham's alleged attacker in her book) sought legal advice to ensure people didn’t associate him with the content. In the book, Dunham describes “Barry” as a guy who wore cowboy boots, sported a mustache, hosted a radio show, worked at a campus library, and graduated Oberlin in 2005. According to the man’s attorney, Aaron Minc, that description warrants enough detail to point a finger at his client. Dunham later apologized for the confusion and Random House reprinted the book with a clarification, releasing a statement saying: "Random House, on our own behalf and on behalf of our author, regrets the confusion."

Other passages in the book recounting interactions of a sexual nature, starting when she was seven years old, with her then one-year-old sister Grace also attracted significant controversy, and prompted numerous think pieces about children's sexuality and personal boundaries.

A Casual Romance Productions

In April 2015, Dunham, Jennifer Konner and Ericka Naegle launched A Casual Romance Productions, a production company which will develop television and film projects. The company has produced Suited, and It's Me Hilary: The Man Who Drew Eloise, with additional projects in development.

Lenny Letter

In 2015, Dunham co-founded Lenny Letter with Jenni Konner. In addition to the regular newsletter, Lenny Letter published a Fiction Issue and a Poetry Issue during fall 2015. Lenny Letter is developing a book imprint and a possible HBO short film series.

Other work

In 2014, Dunham hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live on March 8, 2014 with musical guest The National.

On February 20, 2015, it was reported that Dunham had been cast in a then unknown guest role in an episode of the ABC drama series Scandal, which aired March 19, 2015. Dunham next appeared in her mother, Laurie Simmons film My Art, which had its world premiere at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival. In June 2016, Dunham announced she would be writing another book.

Dunham has appeared on the cover of magazines, including Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, and Rolling Stone. After Dunham posed with bare legs for Glamour's February 2017 cover, she praised the magazine for featuring an unedited photo and leaving the cellulite on her thighs visible.

Personal life

In 2012, Dunham began dating Jack Antonoff, lead guitarist of the band Fun and the founder of Bleachers. She previously stated that she would not get married until same-sex marriage was legalized; after same-sex marriage was indeed legalized, she and Antonoff stated that the possibility of their getting married is a "definite maybe".

During a podcast in December 2016, she declared that she wished she'd had an abortion, a comment widely condemned. Dunham later issued a lengthy apology on her Instagram.

Dunham was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder as a child, and continues to take a low dose of an antidepressant to relieve her anxiety.

Political life

In fall of 2012, Dunham appeared in a video advertisement promoting President Barack Obama's re-election, delivering a monologue, which, according to a blog quoted in The Atlantic, tried to "get the youth vote by comparing voting for the first time to having sex for the first time". Fox News reported criticism from Media Research Center's Lauren Thompson, public relations professional Ronn Torossian, and media trainer Louise Pennell, which labeled the advertisement as tasteless, inappropriate, and a ploy to lure the younger female vote. It included a comment from Steve Hall of Ad Rants saying that "not everyone was so offended." A friend of Dunham said the actress was not paid for her performance on the spot, and Dunham defended the ad by tweeting "The video may be light but the message is serious: vote for women's rights." In The Nation, Ari Melber wrote "the ad's style is vintage Lena: edgy and informed, controversial but achingly self-aware, sexually proud and affirmatively feminist."

In 2014, Dunham was named the Recipient of Horizon Award 2014 by Point Foundation for her support of the gay community.

In April 2016, she wrote in support of Hillary Clinton, pledging to move to Vancouver, Canada, if Donald Trump won the election. After Trump's win, Dunham wrote she will not be moving to Canada, saying, “I can survive staying in this country, MY country, to fight and love and use my embarrassment of blessings to do what’s right."

In June 2017, Dunham endorsed Jim Johnson, a Democratic New Jersey gubernatorial candidate. Later that month, Dunham endorsed Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, in the United Kingdom general election.

Journals

Monographs