Damien Chazelle

Damien Chazelle is an American filmmaker born in Providence, Rhode Island, who studied filmmaking at Harvard University and there began his collaboration with composer Justin Hurwitz on his debut feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. His 2014 film Whiplash brought him wide attention and an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and he followed it in 2016 with the musical romance La La Land, which received 14 Academy Award nominations and won six, including Best Director. At 32 he became the youngest person to win the Best Director Oscar. His subsequent films include the biographical drama First Man, about astronaut Neil Armstrong, and the epic Babylon, set in early Hollywood. His father Bernard Chazelle is a computer science professor at Princeton University and his mother Celia Chazelle teaches medieval history.