[22][23][24] Dunham attended Friends Seminary before transferring in seventh grade to Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, where she met Tiny Furniture actress and future Girls co-star Jemima Kirke.

"Instead I went to liberal arts school and self-imposed a curriculum of creating tiny flawed video sketches, brief meditations on comic conundrums, and slapping them on the Internet.

[36] In 2007, Dunham starred in a ten-episode web series for Nerve.com entitled Tight Shots,[37][38] 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.

"[39] In 2009, Dunham created the Index Magazine web series, Delusional Downtown Divas, which satirized the New York City art scene.

"[40] Also in 2009, Dunham premiered Creative Nonfiction — a comedy where she plays Ella, a college student struggling to complete a screenplay[41] — at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas.

"It turned out she was in the middle of negotiating a deal to develop a show for HBO and that her partner was Jenni Konner, whom I had worked with on Undeclared and a bunch of other projects.

"Gossip Girl was teens duking it out on the Upper East Side and Sex and the City was women who [had] figured out work and friends and now want to nail romance and family life.

[54] The pilot intentionally references Sex and the City, as producers wanted to make it clear that the driving force behind Girls is that the characters were inspired by the former HBO series and moved to New York to pursue their dreams.

"[55] James Poniewozik from Time reserved high praise for the series, calling it "raw, audacious, nuanced and richly, often excruciatingly funny".

[59][60] In February 2013, Dunham became the first woman to win a Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Comedy Series for her work on Girls.

David Wiegland of the San Francisco Chronicle said: "The entire constellation of impetuous, ambitious, determined and insecure young urbanites in Girls is realigning in the new season, but at no point in the four episodes sent to critics for review do you feel that any of it is artificial".

[75] On February 20, 2015, it was reported that Dunham had been cast in a guest role in an episode of the ABC drama series Scandal, which aired March 19, 2015.

[80] She also voiced Mary in My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, a 2016 American animated teen comedy drama film directed by Dash Shaw.

In 2017, Dunham portrayed Valerie Solanas, the real-life radical feminist and SCUM Manifesto author who attempted to murder Andy Warhol in the late 1960s, in American Horror Story: Cult.

[85] 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 Konner as showrunners and writers.

[86][87] On July 25, 2018, the series held a panel at the Television Critics Association's annual summer press tour featuring executive producer Jenni Konner and cast member Jennifer Garner.

[93] In October 2018, coinciding with the expiration of their joint HBO contract, Dunham and Konner split as producing partners and dissolved their production company.

In December 2023, Netflix announced that Too Much, a new series co-created, written, executive produced, and directed by Dunham, would enter production the following year in the United Kingdom.

[106] Dunham has appeared on several magazine covers, including Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, Popular Mechanics, and Rolling Stone.

After Dunham posed with bare legs for Glamour's February 2017 cover, she praised the magazine for featuring an unedited photo and leaving the cellulite on her thighs visible.

[114] In October 2018, Dunham and Konner announced that Lenny Letter would be shutting down,[9][115] reportedly due to a decline in subscribers and failure to build momentum upon other platforms.

Hundreds of women and men claim that Dunham's production company was responsible for using their image against their consent, filing a lawsuit against Netflix to disallow the film, signing petitions, and creating viral videos protesting the violation.

[120] Dunham claimed in her book Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned" that she had been sexually assaulted by a person she called "Barry".

[142][143] In November 2017, Dunham defended Girls writer Murray Miller, whom actress Aurora Perrineau had accused of sexually assaulting her in 2012 when she was seventeen.

[147][148][149] In October 2018, Dunham was hired to write the screenplay for an untitled film based upon the memoir A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: One Refugee's Incredible Story of Love, Loss, and Survival, by Melissa Fleming, which follows the true story of Doaa Al Zamel, who fled Egypt for Europe and became one of few survivors of a shipwrecked refugee boat, surviving days in open water and supporting herself and two orphaned children with only an inflatable water ring.

[155] Author Alia Malek stated: "The idea that Lena Dunham is better situated to tell the story of a Syrian than somebody else implicit in that is a kind of hierarchy.

[157][158] In a Variety article covering the subject, Gravino claimed that the film's star, Kristine Froseth, had approached her business manager while doing research for her character Sarah Jo, whom she concluded displayed characteristics that suggested she was autistic.

She also criticized the film for its "infantilization" of Sarah Jo, though the producers countered this assessment by stating that the character's childlike qualities were included to reflect the trauma she experienced, rather than to suggest that she was autistic.

In The Nation, Ari Melber wrote "the ad's style is vintage Lena: edgy and informed, controversial but achingly self-aware, sexually proud and affirmatively feminist.

[182] In April 2016, she wrote in support of Hillary Clinton, pledging to move to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, if Donald Trump won the election.