About Lauren
Next Director »Described by the New York Times as “America’s foremost visual chronicler of the plutocracy,” Lauren Greenfield is the founder of Institute and an award-winning filmmaker and photographer known for her groundbreaking work on consumerism, youth culture, and gender. Her mutli-award-winning documentary films include Thin, The Queen of Versailles, Generation Wealth, and The Kingmaker. In 2024 Lauren debuted her first-ever television docu-series, the five-part “Social Studies” for FX, an urgent and in-depth look at teenagers and their relationship to social media. In 2025, the Broadway adaptation of The Queen of Versailles will make its public debut, starring Kristen Chenoweth and F. Murray Abraham, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz.
Lauren’s iconic photography dissolves the traditional boundaries between photojournalism, fashion, documentary, and fine art. Her work has been shown at leading cultural institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Smithsonian, the International Center of Photography, and the Harvard Art Museum. Her monographs include Fast Forward, Girl Culture, Thin, and Generation Wealth.
Lauren has also applied her photographic vision to print advertising and commercials, creating innovative spots and print campaigns for hundreds of major international brands and earning spots on Adweek’s Creative 100 list and Campaign’s Inspiring Women list along the way. Her viral #LikeAGirl spot for Always was recently named by Ad Age as the top Super Bowl spot of all time, and also received an Emmy, a Titanium Lion, Best in Show at the AICP Awards, and was added to the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) permanent collection.
In 2019, Lauren and her husband and producing partner Frank Evers founded Institute to address the advertising industry’s systemic lack of diversity. The studio has built a reputation for fostering auteur talent in the commercial space, producing the first-ever ad campaigns for directors such as Karyn Kusama and Pamela Adlon, and for celebrating multi-hyphenate creatives who also work across documentary and photography.
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