Damien Chazelle

Damien Sayre Chazelle (; born January 19, 1985) is an American film director, screenwriter and producer. He is known for directing the films Whiplash (2014), La La Land (2016), First Man (2018) and Babylon (2022). For Whiplash, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. His biggest commercial success came with La La Land, which was nominated for 14 Academy Awards, winning six including Best Director, making him the youngest person to win the award at age 32. He has also directed two episodes of the Netflix limited series The Eddy (2020). Early life and education Chazelle was born in Providence, Rhode Island to a Catholic family. His French-American father, Bernard Chazelle, is the Eugene Higgins Professor of computer science at Princeton University. His mother, Celia, is from an English-Canadian family based in Calgary, Alberta, and teaches medieval history at The College of New Jersey. Chazelle was raised in Princeton, New Jersey, where, although a Catholic, he attended a Hebrew school for four years due to his parents' dissatisfaction with his religious education at a church Sunday school.