Lauren Greenfield’s groundbreaking docuseries Social Studies captures teen life in all its unruly, digital-age complexity. The five-episode series aired on FX to rave reviews for its depiction of the first generation raised by social media.


The project follows a group of teenagers as they navigate the anxieties of young adulthood, social media, and post-Covid-era isolation. Greenfield films her adolescents with verite intimacy and has full access to their phones through screen-record technology. This approach lets viewers experience the teens’ real-world identities and online personas side by side, revealing how both exist—and evolve—in tandem.


The series, as a result, depicts our tech-infused existence like no documentary before it.


Greenfield is the celebrated documentary filmmaker behind The Queen of Versailles, winner of the US Documentary Directing Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Her other projects have included Generation Wealth, The Kingmaker, and the award-winning #likeagirl Super Bowl commercial.


For this Spotlight event, Greenfield discusses how she captured the digital lives of the insecure, clout-chasing teenagers of Social Studies. She also shares insights on creating her first docuseries, gaining the trust of her participants, and her own personal thoughts on social media. 

Named by the New York Times “America’s foremost visual chronicler of the plutocracy,” Emmy Award–winning filmmaker/photographer Lauren Greenfield has produced groundbreaking work on consumerism, youth culture, and gender for the last 25 years. Her films The Kingmaker, Generation Wealth, The Queen of Versailles, and Thin, and photography books Generation Wealth, Fast Forward, and Girl Culture have provoked international dialogue about some of the most important issues of our time. more...
Moderator | Digital Course & Event Producer
Soheil Rezayazdi is a Digital Course & Event Producer at the Sundance Institute, where he produces multi-session courses, master classes, filmmaker Q&As, and other digital programs for Sundance Collab. Prior to Sundance, Soheil served as the Nonfiction Programs Manager at the Gotham Film & Media Institute. He oversaw the Gotham’s core documentary programs: the Documentary Feature Lab, the Spotlight on Documentaries project market, and the Documentary Development Initiative in partnership with HBO Documentary Films. Soheil has worked with emerging filmmakers since 2015, when he began a seven-year tenure at the Columbia University MFA Film Program. At Columbia he managed the Columbia University Film Festival (CUFF), the Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival, and the Carla Kuhn Memorial Speaker Series. Soheil is also a freelance writer on film and pop culture with articles in Indiewire, McSweeney’s, Vice, Filmmaker Magazine, Documentary Magazine, Paper, Paste, and elsewhere. He has also served as an external reviewer for artist programs operated by Creative Capital, Kartemquin Pictures, Chicken & Egg Pictures, and the International Documentary Association. A native of Iran, he holds an MA in journalism and a BA in film studies from the University of Iowa. more...

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