Lenny Abrahamson

Leonard Ian Abrahamson (born 30 November 1966) is an Irish film and television director. He is best known for directing independent films Adam & Paul (2004), Garage (2007), What Richard Did (2012), and Frank (2014), and Room (2015), all of which contributed to Abrahamson's six Irish Film and Television Awards. In 2015, he received widespread recognition for directing Room, based on the novel of the same name by Emma Donoghue. The film received four nominations at the 88th Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director for Abrahamson. In 2020, he directed six episodes of and executive produced the television series Normal People, for which he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series. Early life and education Abrahamson was born in Rathfarnham, Dublin, the son of Jewish parents Edna (née Walzman) and Max Abrahamson, a solicitor. Although his upbringing was not devoutly religious, his family belonged to an Orthodox synagogue, and he had a bar mitzvah ceremony and attended a cheder. Both sides of his family were originally from Eastern Europe; his maternal grandparents were Polish Jews who settled in Ireland in the 1930s, while his paternal grandfather, after whom he was named, was surgeon Leonard Abrahamson, a Ukrainian Jew from Odesa. Abrahamson's mother was a childhood friend of the future President of Israel, Chaim Herzog; both were the children of Polish-Jewish immigrants to Ireland, and grew up on Bloomfield Avenue in Portobello. He was educated at The High School and Trinity College Dublin, where he was elected a scholar in philosophy in 1988, having transferred after a year of studying theoretical physics.