Hailey Benton Gates has built one of the more unusual résumés in contemporary entertainment, moving from modeling campaigns for luxury fashion houses to hosting a documentary series that took her into conflict zones, before ultimately landing behind the camera as an award-winning film director.
Her 2025 Sundance Film Festival win for her directorial debut, Atropia, marked the culmination of a career defined by reinvention.
Gates is known across multiple disciplines: as a face for Miu Miu campaigns, as the host of Viceland’s States of Undress, as a character actress in acclaimed films like Uncut Gems and Challengers, and now as a filmmaker whose satirical war comedy earned the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for dramatic features. Few performers move this fluidly between industries while maintaining credibility in each.
Her story matters not just for its breadth but for what it represents: a creative figure who used early access to the fashion and media worlds as a launching pad into serious storytelling, eventually using her own directorial voice to examine American culture with biting, absurdist humor.
Profile
| Full Name | Hailey Benton Gates |
| Born | March 28, 1990 |
| Age | 36 years old |
| Birthplace | Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Actress, Director, Writer, Model, Journalist |
| Parents | Separated during her childhood |
Early Life
Hailey Benton Gates was born on March 28, 1990, in Los Angeles, California, into a family with deep Southern California roots stretching back seven generations. Her great-grandfather served as the first mayor of Santa Monica, and her maternal grandmother is screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury, best known for writing Robert Altman’s celebrated 1975 film Nashville. Gates’s parents separated during her childhood, and she grew up immersed in the area’s distinctive creative and civic history.
After finishing her early education in the Los Angeles area, Gates moved to New York in 2008 to study at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she spent four years immersed in experimental theater and playwriting. She has described her teenage and early-adult self with self-deprecating humor, recalling baby-powder-bottle dance pieces and writing workshops at UCLA where she studied alongside adults twice her age, including future Twin Peaks co-star Sherilyn Fenn.
Gates graduated from NYU in 2012 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in experimental theater, after which she briefly worked in the advertising department of The Paris Review while auditioning for acting roles on the side, a period that bridged her academic training and her entry into professional creative work.
Education
Gates trained at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in experimental theater in 2012. Her academic grounding in experimental performance later informed the offbeat, satirical tone that would define her work as a writer and director.
Career
Gates began her professional life as a model, working campaigns for brands including Miu Miu and Costume National, work that gave her early visibility within the fashion industry. That platform led to her hosting the Viceland documentary series States of Undress, which ran from 2016 to 2017 and sent her to fashion weeks and communities in conflict-affected regions such as Gaza, Haiti, Beirut, and Caracas, examining how clothing intersects with identity, culture, and survival under hardship.
As an actress, Gates carved out a niche playing small but memorable supporting roles in acclaimed films. She appeared as the “drugged-out mother” in David Lynch’s 2017 revival of Twin Peaks, played an auction house employee in the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems in 2019, and turned up as a Tinder date in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers in 2024. She also appeared in Ricki and the Flash alongside Meryl Streep and in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, building a reputation within the A24-adjacent film world as a reliable scene-stealer in brief but distinctive parts.
Gates moved into directing with the 2019 short film Shako Mako, commissioned as part of Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series, which explored themes of identity and performance through a satirical military training scenario. That short laid the groundwork for her feature directorial debut, Atropia, a satirical war drama set in one of the American military’s fake training towns used to simulate Middle Eastern conflict zones. Produced by Luca Guadagnino and starring Alia Shawkat and Callum Turner, Atropia premiered in competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic features, a significant breakthrough that established Gates as a directorial talent in her own right.
Following the success of Atropia, Gates appeared in The Moment, a mockumentary directed by Aidan Zamiri in which she plays a character based on pop star Charli XCX’s real-life creative director, continuing her pattern of taking on roles that blur the line between performance and commentary on contemporary culture.
Awards & Nominations
- Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic Features — 2025 Sundance Film Festival, for Atropia
Personal Life
Gates has spoken about the family connections that shaped her creative identity, particularly her relationship with her grandmother, screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury, to whom she dedicated Atropia. After Sundance, she developed a public friendship with pop star Charli XCX, who became an admirer of Atropia after watching it on the festival’s streaming platform; the two later collaborated on The Moment. At Coachella, Charli XCX publicly referenced a “Hailey Benton Gates summer,” a moment that helped raise Gates’s profile well beyond film festival circles and into mainstream pop culture conversation.
Gates has reflected candidly in interviews on the difficulty of getting Atropia distributed even after its acclaimed Sundance premiere, noting that potential buyers were initially hesitant about the film’s unusual satirical tone. She has described this period as a formative lesson in the realities of independent filmmaking, one that contrasted with the immediate validation of winning the festival’s top dramatic prize. Gates has kept much of her romantic life private, with her public narrative centered primarily on her creative collaborations and career milestones rather than her personal relationships.
Friends and collaborators have described Gates as someone who moves comfortably between different creative worlds without losing a distinct sense of identity, an observation borne out by her simultaneous work as an actress for hire in other directors’ films while developing her own directorial voice. She has continued to split her time between acting assignments and developing future directing projects, suggesting that Atropia was the beginning of a sustained filmmaking career rather than a one-off creative detour.
Net Worth
Gates’s net worth has not been publicly disclosed in detail, but her income reflects a multi-pronged career spanning modeling contracts, television hosting fees from her run on States of Undress, acting salaries from major studio and independent film roles, and directing income following the acclaimed release of Atropia. Her diversified portfolio across fashion, journalism, acting, and filmmaking provides multiple revenue streams uncommon among performers focused on a single discipline.
Notable Works & Achievements
Filmography
- Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) — actress
- Uncut Gems (2019) — actress
- Shako Mako (2019) — writer/director
- Challengers (2024) — actress
- Atropia (2025) — writer/director
- Marty Supreme (2025) — actress
- The Moment (2026) — actress
- The Drama (2026) — actress
Conclusion
Hailey Gates’s career resists easy categorization, and that is precisely what makes her trajectory so compelling. From international runways to conflict-zone journalism to acclaimed supporting film roles, she arrived at directing not as a first ambition but as the natural extension of years spent observing performance, identity, and culture from multiple angles.
With Atropia‘s Sundance win behind her and new acting and directing projects on the horizon, Gates appears poised to continue building a body of work defined by satire, sharp cultural observation, and a willingness to move fluidly between roles in front of and behind the camera.