Panic!: Social Studies

Lauren Greenfield has produced groundbreaking work on consumerism, youth culture, and gender for the last twenty-five 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 the Best Director Award at Sundance, received 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) were shown at the Sundance, Venice, Telluride, and Toronto festivals and garnered Writers Guild and Critics Choice nominations. Most recently, Greenfield has returned to her roots with L.A. youth with Social Studies. A Los Angeles native, she lives in Venice, California.

Jonathan Gelfond is a 20-year-old Los Angeles-born student filmmaker in his third year at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In high school, he was a subject in Lauren Greenfield’s series Social Studies, which captured his senior year as he worked on a parallel film about teens and social media, inspired by his work at Teen Line. At UCSB, he is an honors student double majoring in Psychological & Brain Sciences and Film and Media Studies, and minoring in Applied Psychology. Jonathan has tailored his education to bridge these idiosyncratic interests, focusing on neuroscience research, media psychology, critical media studies, and film production. He hopes to continue synthesizing these two distinct yet interrelated passions through documentary and entertainment work in his future pursuits.

Miguel Penabella is Assistant Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center and a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines conspiracy, spectrality, and melancholia as theoretical frameworks for examining historical revisionism in the Philippines and the links between former presidents Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte. He has taught courses on digital theory, conspiracy, and cultural theory. He is a former coordinating editor of Media Fields Journal.