Jane Flannery Schoenbrun (; born February 5, 1987) is an American filmmaker. They are known for directing the films We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021), I Saw the TV Glow (2024), and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026).
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Early life and education
Jane Flannery Schoenbrun was born to Jewish parents on February 5, 1987, in the Queens borough of New York City. They were raised in Ardsley, New York. They are the eldest of three siblings.
Schoenbrun was a horror fan as a child; in fifth grade, they spent a month watching the entire Nightmare on Elm Street series. Growing up, they worked at a local film theater. At age thirteen, Schoenbrun frequented online message boards, including forums dedicated to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, and various bands. They wrote fake spoilers for Buffy which were spread around the Internet as if they were authentic. They wrote fan fiction and spent a lot of time participating in online fan communities. Schoenbrun attributes this experience as informing the themes and content of their filmmaking.
They graduated from Boston University in 2009 with a bachelor's degree in film.
Career
While in college, Schoenbrun worked as a production assistant on short films by the Safdie brothers. After graduating, they moved back to New York and began working for the Independent Filmmaker Project. From 2011 to 2019, they wrote articles for Filmmaker magazine. In 2014, they served as the lead of film partnerships at Kickstarter.
Schoenbrun made their directorial debut in 2018 with the documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination. The original upload of the documentary was on Vimeo on June 18, 2018. The documentary remained uploaded on the platform for several months before being taken down for unknown reasons. The film centers the fictional creepypasta Slender Man, being composed entirely of a compilation of found footage-style community-made videos that existed on YouTube prior to the documentary's creation. The documentary was inspired by other Slender Man videos, demonstrating how user-generated videos can create online communities and shared lore.
Their film We're All Going to the World's Fair premiered during the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. The film follows the story of a teenage girl named Casey, portrayed by Anna Cobb, who joins an "occult online game" and comes under the eye of a middle-aged man named JLB who expresses the desire to protect Casey from the ill effects of the game. Critical reception of the film included speculation on the nature of the relationship as predatory, though some critics note that nothing in the film explicitly supports this idea. The film was inspired by creepypasta aesthetics. Schoenbrun has stated that We're All Going to the World's Fair attempts to "use the language of cinema to articulate the hard-to-describe feeling of dysphoria," through its in-universe videos of participants of the World's Fair challenge experiencing unusual bodily symptoms. The film shares themes with A Self-Induced Hallucination and I Saw The TV Glow, such as trans community formation through shared interests in media, "self-annihilation" through media, and the blurring of reality and media. Critics noted that it paid homage to low-budget horror films such as Paranormal Activity.
On October 7, 2021, Deadline reported that Schoenbrun's next feature, I Saw the TV Glow, was in development. The film was co-produced by Fruit Tree and A24, the latter of which would also distribute the film. Starring Justice Smith and Jack Haven, I Saw the TV Glow follows two teenage outcasts who bond over their shared love for a paranormal television series, only for them to lose touch with reality upon the show's cancellation. Schoenbrun has described a recurring childhood dream involving "the field behind the field" near their high school that served as a visual and thematic influence on the film's atmosphere and tone. Schoenbrun began writing the script for this film while they were about two months into hormone replacement therapy. They have stated that they view Justice Smith and Jack Haven's characters as being different sides of themself during the transition process. The film premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival before screening at the Berlin International Film Festival and the South by Southwest Film Festival. I Saw the TV Glow was released in select theaters on May 3, 2024, before a wide release on May 17. The film was "hailed as an acutely intense psychodrama of self discovery."
Style and themes
Schoenbrun's work frequently explores themes of dysphoria, mediated identity, and blurring the line between reality and fantasy. They have described these frequent themes as central to their art, often drawing from experience they encountered in online spaces and from unarticulated feelings regarding their queer identity that they did not have the words for at the time.
Schoenbrun has discussed how these internet communities helped inform their thematic approach to A Self Induced Hallucination and later projects, specifically their interest in participatory digital storytelling and boundaries between online identity and fantasy.
Gender identity and dysphoria are prominent themes in Schoenbrun's work. They have frequently described I Saw the TV Glow as a film about the "egg crack", a term for the moment in a trans person's life when they realize their identity does not correspond to their assigned gender. Schoenbrun and critics alike have written of how the representations of trans characters and trans-adjacent characters within their filmography are for trans people, and are coded in ways that do not make it explicit for audiences who are unfamiliar with transness or are not trans themselves. Schoenbrun has described the presence of screens, which are frequently featured in their work, as "a metaphor for the ways in which we don't experience ourselves when we're going through dysphoria and coming to terms with transness." Critics have compared Schoenbrun's work to that of David Cronenberg and Kiyoshi Kurosawa in dealing with interactions between the human body and technology.
Personal life
Schoenbrun is transfeminine and non-binary. They realized they were trans while on mushrooms in April 2019, during the process of writing We're All Going to the World's Fair. They subsequently came out after the project wrapped in 2020; one of Schoenbrun's long-term partners, who was the first person to suggest they were trans, is thanked in the credits of the film.
Schoenbrun married Melissa Ader in 2014. The two met in high school.
With the exception of their mother, they are estranged from their immediate family. They are polyamorous and have three partners. As of 2024, they maintain residences in Brooklyn and Chatham, New York.
