Lena Dunham, the actress and writer known for her role in Girls, announced on Wednesday that she has welcomed her first child via surrogate with her husband, Luis Felber. The news was shared in an op-ed published by Vogue.
Dunham, who is 40 years old, revealed in the essay that she and Felber became parents to a daughter. While the exact birth date of the child was not disclosed, Dunham mentioned in the op-ed that she was on a book tour while her surrogate was seven months pregnant. The child arrived 13 days after the surrogate reached full term.
In the Vogue piece, Dunham also reflected on her fertility journey, which included a hysterectomy in 2017 due to severe endometriosis. She had previously detailed her health struggles in her 2026 memoir Famesick, where she discussed her decision to undergo the procedure and her unsuccessful IVF cycle, during which none of her retrieved eggs were viable.
Dunham married Felber, a British-Peruvian musician, in 2021. The couple had kept their plans to expand their family relatively private until Dunham’s announcement on Wednesday. In the Vogue op-ed, she described the process of finding a surrogate she trusted, writing, “I could just tell she knew how to steer an SUV in the snow.”
The announcement comes after Dunham had previously shared in 2024 with The Times that she was in the process of “expanding” her family, though she did not provide further details at the time. The Vogue essay also included details about Dunham’s favorite children’s clothing brands, blending personal reflection with lifestyle content.
Felber, who Dunham described as “the greatest person I’ve ever met” in a 2021 interview with The New York Times, had previously shared that the couple was set up on a blind date by a mutual friend. They met during the COVID-19 lockdown and went on their first date with a walk along the River Thames in London.