Artist Talk: Lauren Greenfield

Lauren Greenfield is an Emmy-award-winning photographer and filmmaker and has been a preeminent chronicler of youth culture, gender, and consumerism for over twenty-five years. Her documentary The Queen of Versailles won the Best Documentary Director Award at Sundance in 2012 (coming to Broadway as a musical this fall, starring Kristin Chenoweth with music by Stephen Schwartz), and her films The Kingmaker, Generation Wealth, and THIN have garnered Emmy, Critics Choice, WGA, & DGA recognition. Greenfield’s award-winning books include Fast Forward (1997), Girl Culture (2002), THIN (2006). In recent years, she directed the ambitious documentary Generation Wealth (2018) and published a retrospective monograph, a global investigation of materialism and social status that synthesizes decades of her photographic work. In partnership with the Annenberg Foundation, who also collaborated with Greenfield on the Social Studies docuseries, the Generation Wealth exhibition toured museums around the world opening at the Annenberg Space for Photography, and traveling to the ICP, the Nobel Peace Center, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, the Hague Fotomuseum, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Copenhagen), and Fotografiska. Greenfield’s photographs—including entire bodies of work such as Fast Forward, Girl Culture, THIN, and Generation Wealth—are held in major institutional collections, including the Harvard Art Museums, the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson), Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the International Center of Photography, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, among others.