David Benioff is an American novelist, screenwriter and television producer.
Background
Benioff was born David Friedman in New York City, to a Jewish family. He is the son of Barbara (Benioff) and Stephen Friedman, who is a former head of Goldman Sachs. As an adult, he changed his last name to Benioff, his mother"s maiden name, to avoid confusion with other writers named David Friedman.
Education
Additionally, he attended the University of California Irvine and Trinity College Dublin, and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in the creative writing program
Career
He is the co-creator and showrunner of the widely acclaimed award-winning Home Box Office series Game of Thrones. He is a distant cousin of Marc Benioff. He is the youngest of three children.
His family is of German Jewish and Russian Jewish descent.
He is an alumnus of The Collegiate School and a Dartmouth College alumnus. At age 22, he worked as a club bouncer and then became a high school English teacher at Poly Preparatory in Brooklyn, New York City.
He then wrote a collection of short stories titled When the Nines Roll Over (And Other Stories) in 2004. Benioff drafted a screenplay of the mythological epic Troy (2004) for which Warner Bros pictures paid him $2.5 million.
He also wrote the script for the psychological thriller Stay (2005), which was directed by Marc Forster and starred Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts.
His screenplay for The Kite Runner (2007), adapted from the novel of the same name, marked his second collaboration with director Marc Forster. He was hired in 2004 to write the screenplay for the X-Men spin-off X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), and worked on the script for three years. In 2008, his second novel, was published.
He has been working on an adapted screenplay of the Charles R. Cross biography of Kurt Cobain but as of 2010 the screenplay has not been used.
He is also working with Doctorate.B. Weiss as executive producer, showrunner and writer on Game of Thrones, Home Box Office"s adaptation of the A Song of Ice and Fire novel series by George Railroad Martin. On April 10, 2014, Benioff announced he and Doctorate.B. Weiss had taken on their first feature film project to write, produce and direct Dirty White Boys, a novel by Pulitzer prize-winning author Stephen Hunter.
Publisher: Viking (August 19, 2004) Publisher: Viking (May 15, 2008) 25th Hour (2002) Troy (2004) Stay (2005) The Kite Runner (2007) X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) Brothers (2009) Game of Thrones (2011–present, 35 episodes) lieutenant"s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2013, 1 episode) In development Heavier Than Heaven (2010).
Membership
While at Dartmouth College, he was a member of Phi Delta Alpha Fraternity and the Sphinxter Senior Society.