Background and career
Gil Kenan (Hebrew: גיל קינן; born October 16, 1976) is an English, Israeli, and American filmmaker. He is best known for directing Monster House (2006), City of Ember (2008), Poltergiest (2015), A Boy Called Christmas (2021), and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024). He has frequently collaborated with filmmaker Jason Reitman. Kenan also earned an Academy Award nomination for Monster House, which was his directorial debut.
Kenan was born in London to a Jewish family. When Kenan was three, his family immigrated to Tel Aviv, Israel. He has one brother. At age eight, Kenan and his family once again moved to Reseda, Los Angeles. Kenan studied at the film division of the University of California, Los Angeles where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in animation in 2002. For his graduate thesis, he created a 10-minute stop-motion/live-action short film, The Lark.
The first public screening of The Lark caught the attention of Jordan Bealmear, who was an assistant at Creative Artists Agency. The agency sent hundreds of copies of Kenan's short in order to interest parties in the film industry and after a few months of interviews, Robert Zemeckis offered Kenan the director's chair for his first feature, Monster House (2006). Executive produced by Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg, it was nominated for that year's Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, losing to Happy Feet. Kenan followed Monster House with City of Ember, a post-apocalyptic science fiction adventure film based on Jeanne DuPrau's 2003 novel of the same name. Produced by Tom Hanks, it was released in October 2008 to mixed reviews and poor box office results. Kenan's next film, Poltergeist, a remake of the 1982 Tobe Hooper film of the same name, was released in May 2015. In July of that same year, Kenan signed on to direct and co-write a film adaptation of the popular video game series Five Nights at Freddy's by Scott Cawthon, but later withdrew from the project. Kenan also co-wrote and directed the Christmas fantasy film A Boy Called Christmas, and was released on Netflix in 2021. In 2019, Kenan co-wrote a script along with Jason Reitman for Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which is a direct sequel to Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II, was released in 2021. After the film's success, he and Reitman formed a production company Reitman/Kenan Productions and signed an overall deal with Sony Pictures Entertainment to develop more projects. He was later chosen to direct the 2024 film Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, a sequel to Ghostbusters: Afterlife, replacing Reitman, who instead became a producer and was a co-writer of the film with Kenan.
Kenan has cited David Lynch, Richard Elfman, Lotte Reiniger, Zbigniew Rybczyński, and Alfred Hitchcock as influences; he once met with Elfman. Among his favorite movies and short films, Kenan has listed Eraserhead, Forbidden Zone and Tango, as all three influenced Kenan's short The Lark. He first became aware of a director's own style while watching Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits and appreciated Gilliam's point of view as well as that of Steven Spielberg in his 1980s films, leading him to respect a film's craft and storytelling.
In 2005, Kenan married Eliza Chaikin, who was an art director on City of Ember.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
