Lauren Greenfield grew up in Venice, California and graduated from Harvard in 1987. Her photographs have been published widely in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, Harper's, Time, Life, National Geographic, Stern, American Photo, the London Sunday Times Magazine, and other periodicals. In 1993, Greenfield received the first photographic documentary grant sponsored by National Geographic—for a project about Los Angeles youth.
The resulting work, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, became a best-selling photography book (Knopf, 1997) and received the Community Awareness Award from the National Press Photographers' “Pictures of the Year” competition. Excerpts from the book appeared in over fifty major national and international publications and on Good Morning America, CNN, NPR, and the McNeill Lehrer Report. Fast Forward was exhibited extensively in museums, galleries, and photography festivals, including the International Center of Photography (ICP midtown, 1997), the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona (1998), the Nassauischer Kunstverein Museum in Germany, the Moscow Biennial (2000), Visa Pour L'Image in Perpignan, France, and the Naarden Fotofestival in Holland. Fast Forward was optioned by Columbia Pictures and by Fox Searchlight for development as a feature film.
Greenfield has been the recipient of several major awards and grants, including the 1997 ICP Infinity Award for Young Photographer, the Nikon Sabbatical Grant, and the 1999 Hasselblad Grant. In 2001, she became one of Canon's “Explorers of Light,” a select group of world-renowned photographers. Greenfield was one of twelve acclaimed photographers commissioned by Indivisible, a national documentary project sponsored by Pew Charitable Trusts.
Greenfield was one of American Photo Magazine's 100 most influential people in photography. Her work is in many collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, the Center for Creative Photography, the Harvard University Archive, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the St. Louis Museum of Art, the Springfield Museum of Art, the Brauer Museum of Art, the University of Kentucky Art Museum, the Jewish Museum of New York, the Davenport Museum of Art, Iowa, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Readers Digest Collection, and the Hallmark Collection. She is represented by the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles, Robert Koch in San Francisco, and Pace/MacGill in New York.
Her new book entitled Girl Culture (Chronicle Books, Winter, 2002) will be excerpted by Time Magazine in October, 2002. The Center for Creative Photography is curating a traveling exhibition of Girl Culture that will tour museums around the country through 2005, accompanied by an educational curriculum for use by teachers and students.
She resides in Venice, California with her husband and son.