Jane Schoenbrun

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, I Saw the TV Glow (2024), and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026).

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. They have said that they were invested emotionally in fictional relationships more than in real relationships.

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.

Schoenbrun has described themself as a transgender and queer child who did not yet have the language to understand their identity while growing up. Growing up in a largely monocultural suburb in the 1990s, they found emotional safety mainly through television, films, punk music, and online communities.

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. In 2014, they served as the lead of film partnerships at Kickstarter.

They curated special screenings for independent film organizations.

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. Schoenbrun has compared the film to a "work of theological inquiry." Schoenbrun has stated that they do not wish to profit from A Self-Induced Hallucination. 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, "self-annihilation" through 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."

In January 2023, The Film Stage announced that Schoenbrun was set to direct an adaptation of Imogen Binnie's 2013 novel Nevada, which is widely considered a classic of transgender literature. However, Schoenbrun confirmed in a May 2024 interview with The Cut that they had exited the project due to "creative differences with cis people." Schoenbrun said the film would follow a queer director who, while shooting a new installment of a popular horror franchise, becomes obsessed with casting the actress who played the "final girl" character in the original movie. The film premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.

Schoenbrun is also working on a trilogy of novels called Public Access Afterworld, which will be published by Penguin Random House's imprint Hogarth Books. The novels are a combination of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and coming-of-age literature. According to Schoenbrun, Public Access Afterworld will serve as the conclusion to a thematically-linked trilogy of works that includes We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. Schoenbrun described the books as having a "huge mythology about a giant cast of characters with a story that spans centuries and sprawls across alternate universes. It's got a scope that a 90-minute film couldn't hold, and it's about transition, becoming, and truly closing that gap between self and screen until you feel like you're approximating some form of real life." The project was initially pitched as a television show.

On October 23, 2025, Deadline reported that Netflix ordered a straight-to-series adaptation of Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, with Schoenbrun writing and directing. New Regency will serve as the co-studio alongside Netflix. Executive producers on the series include Plan B, Erin Levy, Charles Burns, Yariv Milchan, Arnon Milchan, Natalie Lehmann, and Laura Delahaye. Set in the 1970s, the novel follows teenagers in Seattle who contract a mysterious sexually transmitted infection known as "the Bug" which causes them to develop bizarre physical mutations.

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 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. Critics have compared Schoenbrun's work to that of David Cronenberg and Kiyoshi Kurosawa in dealing with interactions between the human body and technology. 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 maintain residences in Brooklyn and Chatham, New York.

Reception Year Film Rotten Tomatoes Metacritic Box Office 2022 We're All Going to the World's Fair 91% (123 reviews) 78 (24 reviews) $116,523 2024 I Saw the TV Glow 85% (234 reviews) 86 (48 reviews) $5.4 million 2026 Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma 95% (226 reviews) 89 (48 reviews) TBA

Awards and nominations