Lauren Greenfield
Filmmakers · Social Studies (FX/Hulu, 2024)
Director of Social Studies, an unflinching look at a full school year lived through Los Angeles teenagers' own phones and social feeds.
Lauren Greenfield is a documentary filmmaker whose 2024 series Social Studies, released on FX and Hulu, follows a group of Los Angeles teenagers through a full school year using footage drawn largely from their own phones and social-media activity. Rather than reconstructing teen life from the outside, the series lets viewers see what a school year actually looks like through the feeds, messages, and posts teenagers generate and consume themselves — an unusually direct, screen-level view of how social media shapes daily adolescent life.
WORKS IN THE LIBRARY (10)
VIDEOS
Lauren Greenfield - "Social Studies" & Coming of Age in a Social Media World
In this Daily Show segment, posted to the program's official YouTube channel, Lauren Greenfield discusses her FX documentary series Social Studies and what she describes as a generation coming of age inside social media rather than alongside it. The conversation covers how the teenagers she filmed narrate their own identity development through the feedback loops of likes, comments, and algorithmic feeds, and touches on the broader public conversation around regulating platforms that reach minors. TechKids Foundation cites this appearance as a mainstream late-night-television record of Greenfield explaining, in a general-audience comedic-news setting, why she considers heavy adolescent social-media use a subject that warranted a full documentary series rather than a passing trend.
Monocle on Culture, Episode 719: Lauren Greenfield
Monocle on Culture, the weekly radio and podcast strand from global-affairs magazine Monocle, devoted its July 21, 2025 episode to a conversation with documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield about her FX series Social Studies. The program describes the series as an examination of 'the culture of social media, with insight into the real-life habits of teenagers,' and the conversation covers Greenfield's approach to filming Los Angeles teenagers largely through their own phone and social-media activity across a full school year. As in her other interviews, Greenfield discusses constant platform exposure as bound up with identity formation and peer pressure for the teenagers profiled, without attributing any single outcome to social media alone. TechKids Foundation cites this broadcast as an international media outlet's independent editorial judgment that Greenfield's documentary work merits sustained public discussion beyond the U.S. entertainment press.
Interview With 'Social Studies' Creator, Director & Producer Lauren Greenfield
This June 2025 episode of the Next Best Picture Podcast, a film-industry interview show, features creator-director-producer Lauren Greenfield discussing Social Studies, her FX documentary series following Los Angeles teenagers across a school year as they navigate growing up in a world where phones and social platforms are constant. The conversation covers Greenfield's filmmaking choices, including her reliance on footage drawn from the teenagers' own phones and social accounts rather than reconstructed scenes, and her account of how the series moved from its Telluride Film Festival premiere to FX broadcast and streaming on Hulu and Disney+. TechKids Foundation cites this podcast appearance as part of the specialist entertainment-industry press record of Greenfield discussing her own creative and ethical choices in documenting teenagers' digital lives for a general audience.
STUDIES
Lauren Greenfield's Generation Wealth (Artforum review)
In this January 2017 Artforum review, critic Naomi Fry assesses Lauren Greenfield's Generation Wealth exhibition and its accompanying 504-page Phaidon catalogue, mounted at New York's International Center of Photography. Fry traces Greenfield's 25-year photographic arc from 1990s Los Angeles conspicuous consumption through princess culture, cosmetic procedures, and the 2008 financial crisis to present-day global wealth inequality, arguing the work captures a contradiction in which material abundance coexists with visible unhappiness in many of its subjects. The review describes Greenfield's photographs as associating heavy exposure to status- and image-driven culture with dissatisfaction and status anxiety, rather than treating wealth itself as a straightforward source of wellbeing. TechKids Foundation cites this review as an early, serious critical reception of the body of work that shaped Greenfield's subsequent documentary Generation Wealth and, later, Social Studies.
'Generation Wealth' Is a Sprawling Chronicle of Decadence and Decay
Published the day before the film's wide theatrical release, this Outline review by Ann-Derrick Gaillot examines Lauren Greenfield's documentary Generation Wealth, which draws on 25 years of her photography to trace how the pursuit of money and physical perfection has reshaped the people she has followed. Gaillot describes the film revisiting earlier subjects to show consumerism's costs — including strained family time and body-image distress — while also turning the lens on Greenfield's own career ambition as a parallel, less-examined form of compulsive pursuit. The review frames the documentary as both cultural critique and self-implicating confession, associating relentless exposure to status-driven, image-obsessed media and marketing with dissatisfaction rather than presenting wealth or fame as an unambiguous good. TechKids Foundation cites this review as a substantive, independent critical assessment of the film's argument about media-driven materialism's toll on subjects across generations.
Inside Lauren Greenfield's Emmy-Nominated Social Studies Series
In this August 2025 Hollywood Reporter interview, conducted around Social Studies' first Emmy nomination, Lauren Greenfield describes social media's effect on teenagers as 'a generational problem' shaping identity through what she calls 'life lived through a screen.' She recounts audience reactions at community screenings, including lawmakers and advocates who described social-media exposure as tangled up with real mental-health strain among young people they know, and says she intends to keep making work on the subject 'until it's no longer a problem.' Greenfield also describes the teenage subjects of the series reacting to the Emmy nomination with more excitement than she felt herself. TechKids Foundation cites this interview as Greenfield's own framing, in her words, of why she considers heavy social-media use among teenagers an ongoing public concern rather than a resolved issue.
On Girlhood: Lauren Greenfield & Eimear Lynch in Conversation
Published by AnOther Magazine in December 2024, this conversation pairs Lauren Greenfield with Irish photographer Eimear Lynch on how the media environment around girlhood has shifted across their careers. Greenfield traces her arc from documenting 1990s teenagers shaped by television, film, and music in Fast Forward and Girl Culture to her 2024 series Social Studies, which examines how social media intensifies many of the same body-image and peer-pressure dynamics for today's teenagers. Lynch, whose own book documents Irish teenagers on nights out, observes that underlying social pressures on girls have changed less than the technology surrounding them, since most subjects now carry phones and film themselves throughout the same rituals. Both discuss whether awareness of these pressures protects young people from experiencing them. TechKids Foundation cites this exchange as Greenfield's own account of how screen-based media has intensified, rather than created, long-documented pressures on girls.
FILMS
Social Studies
Social Studies is a five-episode 2024 documentary series directed by Lauren Greenfield for FX, following a diverse group of Los Angeles teenagers through a full school year using footage drawn largely from their own phones, texts, and social-media feeds. Rather than reconstructing adolescence from the outside, the series lets subjects narrate their own experiences with cyberbullying, beauty-standard pressure, and the emotional highs and lows of algorithm-driven feeds. Critics and the show's own framing describe near-constant platform use as associated with anxiety, self-image strain, and shifting peer dynamics among the teenagers profiled, without reducing any single outcome to one cause. The series earned a 2025 Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and won a Gotham Television Award. TechKids Foundation cites it as a rare screen-level record of how a school year actually looks through teenagers' own feeds.
Generation Wealth
Generation Wealth is Lauren Greenfield's 2018 documentary, distributed by Amazon Studios after premiering as the opening-night film of Sundance in January 2018. Drawing on 25 years of her own photography, Greenfield revisits subjects from Los Angeles to Moscow, Dubai, and China to examine a widespread pursuit of wealth and image at almost any cost, including child beauty pageants, cosmetic procedures, and celebrity-driven consumer aspiration. The film associates heavy exposure to status-focused media and marketing with materialistic values and body-image strain in some of the young people and families it follows, and turns the camera on Greenfield's own household to ask whether ambition itself can become compulsive. TechKids Foundation cites the film as a wide-ranging visual record connecting media-driven wealth and image culture with strain on families and children, framed by its own director as observation rather than a clinical finding.