Film/TV Show that has inspired your work:

I have a weird range of influences. Everything from Scorsese, Spielberg, and Better Call Saul to The George Lopez Show, Mad TV, and Rick and Morty have shaped my work. I’m a film nerd and comedy nerd wrapped into one.

Dream Actor/Actress to work with:

Oscar Isaac. That fool is SO GOOD. Also, based on how my girlfriend looks at him, I know the ladies will watch him in anything.

The book everyone should read:

Anything by Kurt Vonnegut. His wordplay is everything.

When you’re not creating you are:

Napping, playing tug of war with my dog, Coco, and/or traveling to Mexico to eat bomb tacos.

Social cause you’re most passionate about:

Damn. Most? I feel like the most urgent one is climate change otherwise we’re not gonna get a chance to work on the rest of them.

Marvin Lemus is an award-winning screenwriter, director, and producer with a passion for telling unapologetic stories. Lemus’ eclectic body of work ranges between the film festival circuit and the digital world. Most recently, Lemus co-created and directed Gentefied, a bilingual digital series executive produced by America Ferrera and MACRO (Fences, Mudbound). Gentefied premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. The show has now been adapted as a half-hour dramatic-comedy for Netflix, set to premiere next year.

Lemus' career started after directing his undergraduate thesis film. It was terrible and incredibly unfunny. Determined to learn how to “guarantee a laugh”, Lemus adopted the "Robert Rodriguez Method" of filmmaking and obsessively wrote, produced, directed, edited, and sometimes acted in close to 200 productions. During that time, Lemus studied at the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theatre which is where he met the other founding members of the award-winning sketch group, The Kids Table (TKT). Lemus was a performer, producer, director, and editor of TKT. Over the course of three years, TKT's social satire and topical parodies garnered over 1 million views and was frequently featured on Huffington Post, Gizmodo, Buzzfeed, and Funny or Die to name a few. They even won a free trip to Switzerland once to receive an award for a video he shot in his living room with 50 bucks. Best ROI ever. 

Lemus’ success with low-budget videos quickly led to rent-paying work in digital comedy led to working with rising comedy stars including Tessa Thompson, Olivia Munn, and Lil’ Rel Howery. Lemus also directed successful viral videos for brands such as Vogue, Anheuser-Busch, Nissan, MLB, Time, and the wildly successful digital campaign for the feature film, Dear White People, which received over 8 million views.

Lemus is a Film Independent Project Involve Alumni, but only after applying six years in a row. It was as a Project Involve Fellow that he was able to direct the short film, Vámonos. Vámonos went on to screen internationally in over 40 film festivals and won awards at NBCUniversal Short Film Festival, Frameline40, and a prestigious Imagen Award. Additionally, Lemus is an alum of the 2017 Sony Diverse Director's Program and is a current fellow of the ‘18-’20 Disney/ABC Directors Fellowship. 

Lemus is a Mexican + Guatemalan-American anchor-baby born in the hot AF desert of Bakersfield, CA.