Benh Zeitlin

Zeitlin was born in Manhattan and raised in Sunnyside, Queens, New York City, 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, while his mother comes from a rural Protestant background in Darlington, South Carolina.\n', '

In 2004, Benh co-founded the Court 13 independent collection of filmmakers, named after a neglected Wesleyan University squash court that Zeitlin and his friends commandeered as a filming site. He and his younger sister Eliza moved to New Orleans while Benh was making his first short film, Glory at Sea, in 2008.\n', '

In 2012, his first feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild, adapted from a play entitled…