Lauren Greenfield (born 1966) is an American artist, documentary photographer, and documentary filmmaker. She has published four photographic monographs, directed four documentary features, produced four traveling exhibitions, and published in magazines throughout the world. Early life and education Greenfield was born on June 28, 1966, in Boston, Massachusetts, to psychologist Patricia Marks Greenfield and physician Sheldon Greenfield. She has a younger brother, film producer Matthew Greenfield. She attended Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in Santa Monica. Greenfield graduated from Harvard University in 1987 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in visual and environmental studies. While an undergraduate, she studied overseas in several countries with the International Honors Program, a division of SIT Study Abroad. Her senior thesis photography project on the French aristocracy was called "Survivors of the French Revolution". Career Photography Greenfield's undergraduate thesis helped kick start her career as an intern for National Geographic Magazine. A subsequent grant from National Geographic provided financial support toward her debut monograph, "Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood" (Knopf 1997). Five years after the release of "Fast Forward", Greenfield produced a second major body of work about the self-esteem crisis amongst American women, entitled "Girl Culture". Film Undergraduate years From September 1985 to May 1986, while still an undergraduate at Harvard, Greenfield traveled around the world on a nine-month-long program created by the International Honors Program, entitled "Film Study and Anthropology". This experience exposed her to anthropological and documentary filmmaking in France, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, India, Australia, and Japan. In a 2012 interview with Sara Melson (for Harvardwood.com), Greenfield was quoted as saying "We watched many indigenous films, and we met with amazing directors. It was on that trip that I realized my calling. I wasn't sure if it would be sociology, film, photography, or anthropology, but looking at culture was my calling. When I got back to Harvard, I switched my major from Social Studies to Visual Studies. I soon realized that theory wasn't my medium, and I moved toward filmmaking and photography." At Harvard, Greenfield continued her filmmaking studies under the tutelage of established documentary filmmaker Robb Moss. In 1988, she co-directed a 25-minute film, Once You're In, about Irish illegal immigrants living in Boston. THIN (HBO) Greenfield subsequently directed THIN, a feature-length documentary for HBO, and published an accompanying book with the same title. THIN was selected for competition at the Sundance Film Festival in