Spotlight: Documenting Digital Lives with Lauren Greenfield (SOCIAL STUDIES)

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.

Greenfield’s iconic photography has received nearly every award in the industry and is collected by museums including SFMOMA, LACMA, the Getty, the International Center of Photography, and the Harvard Art Museum. Most of her films began as photography works, from her Emmy-nominated debut Thin, to the box office hit The Queen of Versailles which won her the Best Director Award at Sundance, a DGA nomination, and was named “one of the top documentaries of all time” by Vogue. Greenfield’s subsequent films Generation Wealth (Amazon Studios) and The Kingmaker (Showtime) played Sundance, Venice, Telluride and Toronto festivals and garnered Writers Guild and Critics Choice nominations. The Critics’ Choice honored The Kingmaker for the “Most Compelling Living Subject of a Documentary.” Generation Wealth earned Greenfield the “Spirit of Independence” Award from Film Independent.

Alongside her film and photography career, Greenfield has directed award-winning advertising campaigns. Her viral Super Bowl spot, #LikeAGirl, swept commercial awards including 14 Cannes Lions, making Greenfield the first woman named “Most Awarded Director” by Ad Age. In February 2025, the viral spot was voted by Ad Age readers as the "Best Super Bowl Ad of All Time", beating out 15 other legendary Super Bowl ads going back decades.

In 2019, Greenfield founded Girl Culture Films, now Institute, with her producing partner Frank Evers. Together, they are also producing a musical based on The Queen of Versailles, starring Kristin Chenoweth and F. Murray Abraham, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, opening on Broadway, November, 2025.

Greenfield, named one of US Campaign’s 2025 Most Inspiring Women, returns to her roots with L.A. youth with Social Studies, a critically acclaimed, groundbreaking documentary series that delves into the lives of the first generation raised on social media. Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival, Social Studies, now streaming on FX/Hulu and Disney+, garnered an Independent Spirit nomination, Gotham and Webby nominations and inclusion in The Atlantic’s “13 Best Shows of the Year.” 

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.