Marvin Lemus is an award-winning director, co-creator, co-showrunner, and executive producer of Netflix’s hit series Gentefied. The half-hour dramedy was adapted from his original digital series after premiering at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, and was produced by MACRO Studios and America Ferrera. Gentefied was nominated for a prestigious Peabody Award and three Imagen Foundation Awards, including Best Comedy Series, and was named one of the 10 Best TV Shows of 2020 by the Los Angeles Times. Additionally, The Grapevine, an episode written by Lemus, was named one of TV Critics’ Top 10 Episodes of 2020 by The Hollywood Reporter. Lemus is an alum of the Sony Diverse Directors Program, the Disney/ABC Directors Fellowship, and Film Independent’s Project: Involve. Most recently, he made his feature directorial debut with Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, which premiered on Disney+ in March 2025 and stars Eva Longoria and Cheech Marin.
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 improvisational comedy 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). 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 R.O.I. ever.
Lemus’ success with low-budget videos quickly led to rent-paying work and the opportunity to collaborate with rising comedy stars including Tessa Thompson, Olivia Munn, and Lil’ Rel Howery. Lemus also directed successful viral videos for brands such as Vogue.com, Anheuser-Busch, Nissan, MLB, Time.com, 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.
Lemus is a Mexican + Guatemalan-American anchor-baby born in the hot AF desert of Bakersfield, CA.
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