Early life and education
Kenan was born in London, England, to a Jewish family. When he was around three years old the family moved to Tel Aviv, Israel, and when he was about eight they relocated to the United States, settling in Reseda, a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles. He grew up there as a teenager.1
After graduating from high school, Kenan was accepted into a summer internship program for aspiring filmmakers called Inner City Filmmakers. His first paying film job was as an editorial intern on Tony Scott's submarine thriller Crimson Tide (1995). He went on to study at UCLA's film school, where he earned an MFA in animation in 2002. His graduate thesis film, a roughly ten-minute stop-motion and live-action short titled The Lark, screened at the Directors Guild of America as part of the UCLA Spotlight Awards and led to his being signed by Creative Artists Agency.1
Career
The Lark caught the attention of director Robert Zemeckis, who met with Kenan about an animated project that became Monster House. Kenan made his feature directorial debut with the film in 2006. Executive produced by Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg, Monster House used performance-capture animation and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (losing to Happy Feet), as well as an Annie Award for directing.1
He followed it with the post-apocalyptic science fiction film City of Ember (2008), adapted from Jeanne DuPrau's novel and produced by Tom Hanks. In 2015 he directed the remake of Poltergeist, a new take on the 1982 supernatural horror film. The following year he directed the episode "Village of the Damned" for the MTV television series Scream. In 2021 he co-wrote and directed the Netflix holiday fantasy A Boy Called Christmas.1
Kenan's working relationship with Jason Reitman, who would become his most frequent collaborator, began years earlier: the two met in a hockey locker room while Kenan was editing Monster House and Reitman was editing Thank You for Smoking, and they hit it off. After co-writing Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the pair formed Reitman/Kenan Productions and signed an overall deal with Sony Pictures Entertainment. Beyond Ghostbusters, the two co-wrote Saturday Night (2024), Reitman's film dramatizing the chaotic ninety minutes before the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live in 1975; their screenplay won the St. Louis Film Critics Association Award for Best Original Screenplay.3
Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)
Kenan co-wrote Ghostbusters: Afterlife with director Jason Reitman and served as an executive producer.1 The film, a direct continuation of the original two movies set on a rural Oklahoma farm, reframed the franchise around the family of the late Egon Spengler.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)
For the sequel, Kenan stepped up to direct and co-wrote the screenplay with Reitman, who moved into a producing role. He also provided the voice of the film's antagonist, the ancient god-like entity Garraka,1 and personally performed the on-set puppeteering for the Possessor in its folding-chair form, lying on his back to operate it.
Kenan brought a great deal of personal material to the production. Many of the volumes seen in Ray's Occult Books came from his own book collection, and he brought the haunted dolls to set himself; the doll exorcised by Lars Pinfield and Lucky Domingo was a real antique he and his wife found in a shop near their home in Hampstead, London. The cat drawn on Nadeem Razmaadi's front door was a last-second addition based on a doodle his wife used to draw for their daughter, Una. The human pinkie finger found by Phoebe Spengler was inspired by a children's mummy-making workshop Una attended at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Part of the design for Garraka drew on Der Struwwelpeter, a German children's book about a boy with grotesquely long fingernails that Kenan's German grandfather had read to him as a child.
Several touches connected Frozen Empire back to Monster House: Nadeem's in-film video game is a modern riff on the game "Thou Art Dead" that appeared in Kenan's debut feature, and the sound effects for the Possessor's haunted tricycle were re-used from the Monster House tricycle, recovered from a hard drive by sound designer Will Files. The tricycle itself was conceived as a nod to horror films, including the bikes from the Saw series and The Shining.
Ghostbusters: Night Shift (Netflix animated series)
Kenan and Reitman are executive producers on the franchise's first new animated series in decades. In June 2026, Netflix and Sony Pictures Animation revealed the title Ghostbusters: Night Shift, with a 2027 premiere planned.2 The series follows a new team of Ghostbusters in early-1990s Manhattan, during a period when Walter Peck is mounting his first campaign for mayor.4
Personal life
In 2005, Kenan married art director Eliza Chaikin, who worked as art director on his film City of Ember. The couple have a daughter named Una and have lived in the Hampstead area of London.1
References
Some content on this page was researched using the Ghostbusters Wiki on Fandom.
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"Gil Kenan," Wikipedia, accessed 2026-06-13, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Kenan.
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Deadline, "'Ghostbusters' Animated Netflix Series Reveals Title, Logo Art" (June 6, 2026), https://deadline.com/2026/06/ghostbusters-animated-netflix-series-title-logo-art-1236942813/.
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"Saturday Night (2024 film)," Wikipedia, accessed 2026-06-13, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_(2024_film).
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The Hollywood Reporter, "'Ghostbusters: Night Shift': Netflix and Sony Animation Reveal Title, Logo for New Series" (June 6, 2026), https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/ghostbusters-night-shift-netflix-sony-animation-title-logo-1236615360/.
