Lena Dunham Biography

Lena Dunham is the star and creator of the HBO television show Girls. A New Yorker, Dunham graduated from Ohio’s Oberlin College in 2008. She returned to New York and shot her first feature film, Tiny Furniture (2010), in her parents’ apartment (the film co-starred her mother and sister). A comic look at post-college life, the film won over critics and made a splash at film festivals. With an assist from Judd Apatow, Dunham created Girls, a down-and-dirty look at post-college life, featuring four young, hyper-ironic women. The show launched in 2012 and was a near-immediate hit, earning five 2013 Emmy nominations, including nods for Dunham as writer and star. (She was again nominated as lead actress in a comedy or musical series in 2014 and 2015.) In 2012 she won a $3.5 million dollar book deal; the book, Not That Kind of Girl, was published in 2014. Girls was renewed by HBO several times; the show’s sixth and final season is scheduled to air in 2017.