Helena Howard

Helena Howard is an American actress who was discovered by the director Josephine Decker in 2014, when Decker judged the Union County Teen Arts Festival, and made her screen debut in Decker's Madeline's Madeline (2018). Born in New York City and raised in New Jersey, she attended the Union County Academy for Performing Arts and helped shape that film's story through improvisation workshops. She played the title role, and the movie premiered at Sundance in January 2018 before Oscilloscope Laboratories released it that August. Her performance drew critical acclaim: IndieWire placed it among the 50 best of the 2010s, and The New Yorker ranked it second among film performances of this century. She went on to play Nora Reid in the Amazon series The Wilds, appear as Cleo in Shoplifters of the World (2021), and take a role in the short film Twist, which premiered at Tribeca in 2019.