Leilah Weinraub is a director and artist whose films and installations have been presented at the Whitney Biennial, Hammer Museum, MoMA PS1, Tate Modern, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Berlinale. Her practice spans narrative film, feature documentary, experimental cinema, multi-channel video installation, and performance.
Weinraub’s work examines power, identity, labor, and desire through genre-merging visual strategies that move between fiction and reality. She builds cinematic worlds that draw from noir, comedy, documentary, and performance to explore the architectures of myth, autonomy, and spectacle.
Her debut feature SHAKEDOWN—filmed over more than a decade—premiered at the Berlinale before screening internationally and later streaming on Pornhub/ART and the Criterion Channel. The film is now considered a landmark in contemporary nonfiction cinema.
Her short film Seek No Favor (2025), co-directed with Elle Clay, continues her interest in performance, subculture, and the logics of vigilante myth-making. Weinraub’s large-scale project THE KIDS (2025) was commissioned for Made in L.A. 2025 at the Hammer Museum and presented as both a live play and a four-channel video installation.
Beyond filmmaking, Weinraub was a co-founder and CEO of Hood By Air, where she directed the brand’s creative and strategic identity, runway shows, films, and global presentations—helping shape HBA’s emergence as a defining cultural phenomenon of the 2010s.
She has been a visiting artist at Columbia University, Yale University, and the Rikers Island Jail Library Program, and is the founder of the production studio Texarkana.
Weinraub is based in Los Angeles and New York.