American actress, writer, producer, and director Lena Dunham Nude in Girls (2017) s06e01
Lena Dunham (/ˈliːnə ˈdʌnəm/; born May 13, 1986) is an American actress, writer, producer, and director. She is best known as the creator, writer and star of the HBO series Girls (2012–present), for which she has received numerous Emmy award nominations and two Golden Globe awards. Dunham’s work on Girls also led her to become the first woman to win the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Comedy Series in 2013. That year Dunham was included in the 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”.
Along with close friend and Girls show runner Jennifer Konner, in 2015 Dunham created the publication Lenny Letter, a feminist online newsletter which is supported by Hearst Corporation advertising.
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”.
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.
