Mary Lambert

A graduate of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied fine art, filmmaker Mary Lambert applied her art school sensibilities to groundbreaking work in music videos for Madonna, Janet Jackson, Eurythmics and many more pop icons of the period, helping fuel the visually-hungry MTV revolution. Her visual panache developed in the video world led naturally to the hallucinogenic, dreamy landscapes in her first feature, the cult classic Siesta (1987), which received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature after its release. Lambert is perhaps best known for directing Stephen King’s first adaptation of his own work, Pet Sematary, the huge box office success of which inspired a sequel, Pet Semetary II, three years later. Now a prolific television director, and the first woman to direct a SyFy Channel original movie, Lambert has consistently tapped into her own interior mindscape to manifest deeply emotional genre fables, establishing a unique visual lore all of her own design.

Mary is an Assistant Arts Professor at Tisch School of the Arts, Undergraduate Department of Film and Television where she has served as the Area Head of Acting and Directing. She teaches a range of production and craft classes at NYU including Advanced Production Workshop, Narrative Workshop, Sight and Sound Filmmaking, Sight and Sound Studio, and Directing the Camera. She has also taught film and directing classes at AFI, USC, and Chapman University.