Lena Dunham net worth and salary: Lena Dunham is an American actress and filmmaker who has a net worth of $12 million dollars. She is perhaps best known for creating, writing, and starring in the HBO series Girls, for which she received several Emmy Award nominations and two Golden Globe Awards. Dunham also directed several episodes of Girls and became the first woman to win the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Comedy Series.
Early Life: Lena Dunham was born on May 13, 1986, in New York City. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter. Her mother, Laurie Simmons, is an artist and photographer. Her father is Protestant of mostly English ancestry, and her mother is Jewish. Dunham has described herself as feeling "very culturally Jewish, although that's the biggest cliché for a Jewish woman to say." The Dunham family are cousins of the Tiffany family, prominent in the jewelry trade. She has a younger sister, Grace, a 2014 graduate of Brown University, who appeared in Dunham's first film, Creative Nonfiction, and starred in her second film, Tiny Furniture. The siblings were raised in Brooklyn and spent summers in Salisbury, Connecticut.
Dunham attended Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, where she met Tiny Furniture actress and future Girls co-star Jemima Kirke. As a teen, Dunham also won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award. She attended The New School for a year before transferring to Oberlin College. While a student at Oberlin College, Dunham produced several independent short films and uploaded them to YouTube. Many of her early films dealt with themes of sexual enlightenment and were produced in a dialog-heavy style in which young people talk about their personal relationships. In 2006, she produced Pressure, in which a girl and two friends talk about experiencing an orgasm for the first time, which made Dunham's character feel pressured to do so as well.
Another early film, entitled The Fountain, which depicted her in a bikini brushing her teeth in the public fountain at Oberlin College, went viral on YouTube. Dunham was shocked by the backlash and decided to take the video down: "There were just pages of YouTube comments about how fat I was, or how not fat I was," Dunham said. "I didn't want you to Google me and the first thing you see is a debate about whether my breasts are misshapen." Pressures (2006), Open the Door (2007), Hooker on Campus (2007), and The Fountain (2007) were released as DVD extras with Tiny Furniture. In 2007, Dunham starred in a 10-episode web series for Nerve.com entitled Tight Shots, described by The New York Times Magazine's Virginia Heffernan as "a daffy serial about kids trying to make a movie and be artsy and have tons of sex."
She graduated from Oberlin in 2008 with a degree in creative writing.
Career: In 2009, Dunham created the Index Magazine web series, Delusional Downtown Divas, which satirized the New York City art scene. The production was unpaid, so Dunham and her friends pooled their money from babysitting and art-assistant gigs and borrowed some camera gear. That same year, Dunham premiered Creative Nonfiction—a comedy where she plays Ella, a college student struggling to complete a screenplay—at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. She was initially rejected by the festival the year before; she re-edited and successfully resubmitted the film.
She wrote, produced, and directed the 2010 feature film, Tiny Furniture. The film, which featured her high school classmate, received multiple honors, including Best First Screenplay at the Independent Spirit Awards, and the New Generation Award at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards. The success of Tiny Furniture led to her series, Girls, being picked up by HBO in 2012. The production is executive produced by Judd Apatow. She writes, directs, and stars in the series, which chronicles the fictional lives of a group of 20-something girls. The series follows Hannah Horvath (portrayed by Dunham), a 20-something writer struggling to get by in New York City. Some of the struggles facing Dunham's character Hannah—including being cut off financially from her parents, becoming a writer, and making unfortunate decisions—are inspired by Dunham's real-life experiences. Girls received multiple Emmy nominations in 2012, including Outstanding Lead Actress, Outstanding Directing, Outstanding Writing, and Outstanding Comedy Series. In September 2015, Dunham stated that the sixth season of Girls was likely to be the last season. This was later confirmed by HBO. Girls' sixth and final season concluded on April 16, 2017, leaving a total of 62 episodes in the series.
In February 2018, A Casual Romance Productions announced that it would be producing Camping, a remake of the British comedy series of the same name for HBO, with Jennifer Garner in the lead and Dunham and Jenni Konner as showrunners and writers. Camping has been met with a mixed to negative response from critics upon its premiere.
In August 2018, it was announced Dunham would appear in the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, directed by Quentin Tarantino, which released on July 26, 2019. Dunham portrayed the role of Catherine "Gypsy" Share.
In June 2019, it was announced Dunham would direct the first episode of Industry and serve as an executive producer.
In response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, in March 2020 Dunham announced she would write a serialized novel, Verified Strangers, as a response to social isolation. She added that the act was a response to help herself and the readers in the time of anxiety. The serialization started later that month on the Vogue website.
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Personal Life: Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff began dating in 2012. Antonoff is the lead guitarist of the band fun. and the founder of the band Bleachers. They amicably broke up in December 2017.
Dunham was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder as a child and continued to take a low dose of Klonopin to relieve her anxiety until 2018. In April 2020, she celebrated two years of sobriety without any medical assistance.
In February 2018, Dunham wrote an essay for Vogue about her decision to have a hysterectomy due to endometriosis.
Salary Highlights: Lena Dunham received $150,000 per episode for her role on Girls. In October 2012, Lena Dunham signed a $3.5 million book deal with Random House Publishing. The bidding for her book was extremely competitive, initially starting at $1 million. Between June 2013 and June 2014, Lena reportedly earned $4 million from book sales, her television series, and more.
Real Estate: In July 2019, Dunham sold her Brooklyn condo for $2.63 million, accepting a loss on the three-bedroom apartment at 60 Broadway for which she had paid $2.9 million in April 2018. She bought the condo shortly after her break-up with Jack Antonoff, who kept their previously shared Brooklyn Heights home.
Dunham reportedly now rents an apartment in Manhattan's West Village on the second floor of a building that a few of her friends also live in.
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