Quyen Tran’s television direction is careful and unobtrusive. We are most persuaded by her contribution to The Pitt, where clarity helps the hospital’s competing demands wear us down; The Testaments shows the limits of simply keeping a style consistent.
Fi1m perspective
In The Pitt (2025), the hospital staff cannot give everyone enough time. We can follow their work without ever being allowed to settle comfortably into watching it. Tran is one of its directors, and we think this is a better use of her skills than The Testaments. She seems well suited to television that needs to keep several demands in view without losing sight of the people meeting them.
Her cinematography preceded her directing: she was director of photography on Unbelievable (2019) and Palm Springs (2020), before working as both cinematographer and director on Maid (2021). That was where her television directing began. Her background in still photography helps explain her wish to fit narrative information into a single frame. She puts the story first in decisions about shots and lighting. It is a useful discipline for episodic television, where making a scene clear can matter more than making it conspicuous.
That concern for clarity pays off in The Pitt, though the achievement is shared. Editors Mark Strand and Joey Reinisch help keep the workload legible without allowing the pace to become comfortable. We felt worn out by the succession of demands on the staff, and still wanted to keep watching. The awkward opening and thinly written supporting characters matter, but the pressure of the job holds our attention more firmly than Gavin Brivik’s music.
The Testaments (2026) offers a less convincing case, despite its steady direction from Tran, Mike Barker, Jet Wilkinson and Shana Stein. Cinematographers Greta Zozula and Marc Laliberté keep the school in cold, even daylight, with bare walls keeping our attention on faces. It is controlled work, but the resemblance to the previous programme soon makes it easy to stop noticing. Editors Ana Yavari, Wendy Hallam Martin and Lara Johnston keep individual scenes clean; they cannot disguise the joins between episodes or make ten feel necessary. Start with The Pitt, provided an exhausting hospital shift is what the evening calls for.
Biography
Quyen Tran is an American cinematographer and director based in Los Angeles. She studied at UCLA and began her career as a still photographer before moving into film and television.
As a cinematographer she has worked on feature films including Palm Springs (2020), The Little Hours (2017) and Life in a Year (2020), and on series such as Ahsoka (2023), Maid (2021) and A Teacher (2020). She became a member of the American Society of Cinematographers in 2021.
Her directing credits include episodes of The Pitt (2025), Sirens (2025) and The Testaments (2026). She is married to voice actor Sam Riegel and they have two children.
