About Andrea Arnold
Andrea Patricia Arnold OBE (born 5 April 1961) is an English filmmaker and former actress. She won an Academy Award for her short film Wasp in 2005. Her feature films include Red Road (2006), Fish Tank (2009) and American Honey (2016), all of which have won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, while her first documentary feature Cow premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. Arnold's television work includes directing the second season of the HBO series Big Little Lies, and four episodes each of the Amazon Prime Video series Transparent and I Love Dick. == Early life and education == Andrea Patricia Arnold was born on 5 April 1961 in Dartford, Kent, the eldest of four children. She was born when her mother was only 16 years old and her father was 17, and they separated when she was very young. Growing up on a council estate, she spent her youth days constantly exploring the "chalk pits, fields, woods and motorways" of Dartford. Her mother had to bring up all four children alone, which is reminiscent of the narrative in Arnold's third short film, Wasp. As a young girl, she was writing dark stories about human experience. In an interview, Arnold speaks about how when she was 10 years old, she wrote her first play that expressed her "horror" of the slave trade, and a few years later while studying for a dance GCSE, she made a performance piece; "I took quotes from The Diary of Anne Frank and read them aloud as I moved around the room.
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