Lauren Greenfield grew up in Venice 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 (hardcover Knopf, 1997; paperback Chronicle Books, 2004) and received the Community Awareness Award from the National Press Photographers' "Pictures of the Year" competition. Excerpts from the book appeared in over 50 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.

Her most recent book, Girl Culture, published in December 2002, has been reprinted three times by Chronicle Books. Large-scale exhibitions of the same work will be on tour at museums and major festivals throughout the United States and Europe through 2006. To date, more than 250,000 viewers have already seen the work at the Visa Pour L'Image festival in France, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Snite Museum in Indiana, the Davenport Museum of Art, the Skirball Cultural Center, the Johnson Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (Moscow), the Forte Belevedere (Florence), the Festival of Rome, the Theater Namur (Belgium)and the Pace/MacGill, Stephen Cohen, Robert Koch, Reflex and OMC fine art galleries in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Amsterdam and Dusseldorf, respectively.

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.

American Photo recently named Greenfield one of the 25 most influential photographers working today. Her work is in many collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 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 Milwaukee 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 Snite Museum of Art, the Readers Digest Collection, the Hallmark Collection, the Johnson & Johnson Collection, Colby College and the French Ministry of Culture.

She is a member of VII, a photography collective based in Paris, France. She resides in Venice, California with her husband and son.

(2004). Biography. Retrieved April 24, 2005, from http://www.girlculture.com/biography/index.html.