In brief
Nathan Juran (September 1, 1907 – October 23, 2002) was a Romanian-born American film art director and director, best known for his Academy Award-winning contributions to art direction and his later work in science fiction and fantasy cinema.
Born Naftuli Hertz Juran in Gura Humorului, Bukovina, Austria-Hungary (now Romania), to a Jewish family, he immigrated to the United States in 1912 with his parents, settling in Minneapolis. Juran earned a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Minnesota and a master's in architecture from MIT, and spent a summer on scholarship at L’École des Beaux-Arts in France, practicing as an architect before entering the film industry in 1937 as an art director at RKO and later 20th Century Fox.
Nathan Juran was born Naftuli Hertz Juran on September 1, 1907, in Gura Humorului, a town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now part of Romania), to a Jewish family. His parents were Jacob Juran and Gethel (née Goldenberg) Juran, and he was one of several siblings in a modest household shaped by the cultural and economic realities of Eastern European Jewish life at the time.
Photographs
Hero photograph: Not specified in the source, via Wikimedia Commons (Fair use)
