Amanda Marsalis directs complicated television scenes with clarity and an eye for the people caught in them. We recommend her work on The Pitt, where attention to medical detail leaves room for the staff’s exhaustion and warmth.
Fi1m perspective
Several patients need attention at once in The Pitt (2025), and the difficulty is keeping each one distinct. Amanda Marsalis’s strength is making such scenes readable without making the hospital feel orderly. She directed five episodes of the real-time medical drama, using models and extensive blocking before filming to work out the movement. That preparation matters because we can follow the medical work and still register the vulnerability of the people undergoing it.
Her first feature, Echo Park (2014), marked the move from photography into narrative filmmaking; television followed in 2017. Six episodes of Ozark (2018), four in its final season, helped establish her in series drama. Her collaborators include executive producer John Wells, and her strengths suit work that requires individual episodes to remain consistent with the programme around them. The photographer’s attention to composition remains useful, but we value the practical skill of keeping complicated action clear.
In The Pitt, that care helps make an exhausting job absorbing to watch. We felt for the staff because Noah Wyle and Katherine LaNasa make their tiredness and warmth equally convincing. The programme’s opening is awkward, and some supporting characters remain thinly written despite the care taken over the medical work. Directing five episodes does not make Marsalis responsible for every success or weakness of a series. What we can recognise in her approach is the ability to handle medical detail and gore while allowing the patients to remain vulnerable people rather than a succession of technical problems.
Cape Fear (2026) is a less persuasive reason to follow her. Marsalis directed two episodes and served as executive producer, but the ten-episode series has nine directors, so its shortcomings cannot sensibly be blamed on her alone. Javier Bardem’s threatening courtesy and Amy Adams’s matching strength are worth watching; the trouble is how far a short novel has been stretched. Start with The Pitt, and allow it time to get past that awkward opening.
Biography
Amanda Marsalis is an American film director and photographer. She grew up in the East Bay area of San Francisco and later moved to St. Louis, Missouri. She studied photography at the California College of Arts and Crafts.
Marsalis began her career as a photographer, with work published in Vogue, GQ and The New York Times Magazine. Her directorial debut was the 2014 feature Echo Park. She has since directed multiple episodes of television series including six of Ozark (2018–2022), episodes of Westworld (2020), The Umbrella Academy (2019) and Invasion (2021).
In 2025 she directed several episodes of The Pitt, including the Emmy-nominated and DGA Award-winning episode "6:00 P.M.". She also directed two episodes of the 2026 series Cape Fear, on which she served as executive producer.
