Marie Menken was born on May 25, 1909, in Brooklyn, New York, to Lithuanian immigrant parents.
Marie Menken was born on May 25, 1909, in Brooklyn, New York City, to Lithuanian immigrant parents. She grew up in a working-class household in Brooklyn, an environment that would later contrast sharply with the bohemian, avant-garde art world she came to inhabit as an adult.
Her early exposure to painting and the visual arts set her on a path that eventually led her to New York's downtown art and film scenes of the 1940s through 1960s. Though details of her childhood remain sparse in the historical record, her Brooklyn upbringing and immigrant heritage informed her scrappy, self-taught, and experimental approach to art-making, which she would carry into her groundbreaking work in avant-garde cinema.
Menken's birth in this era placed her among a generation of American women artists who would come of age during the interwar years and later become pioneers in underground and experimental film during the mid-20th century, a field almost entirely dominated by men at the time.