Benjamin Harold "Benh" Zeitlin (; born October 14, 1982) is an American filmmaker, best known for directing the 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Life

Zeitlin was born in Manhattan and raised in Sunnyside, Queens, and in suburban Hastings-on-Hudson, NY. He is a graduate of Hastings High School and Wesleyan University. He was born to writers and folklorists Mary Amanda Dargan and Steven Joel Zeitlin, who founded the NYC non-profit cultural organization City Lore. His father, who is Jewish, spent most of his childhood in Brazil, and his mother comes from a rural, Protestant background in Darlington, South Carolina.

Career

In 2004, Zeitlin co-founded the Court 13 independent collection of filmmakers, named after a neglected Wesleyan University squash court that he and his friends had once commandeered as a filming location. Zeitlin and his younger sister Eliza moved to N…Read more on Wikipedia