Diane Martel, the innovative and trailblazing music video director who helmed visuals for some of the biggest artists of the past three decades, including Beyoncé, Mariah Carey, Justin Timberlake, the Killers, and Miley Cyrus, and many more — died on Thursday in New York. She was 63.
“Diane passed away peacefully at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital – surrounded by friends and family – after a long battle with breast cancer,” her family said in a statement. “She is survived by her Aunt, Gail Merrifield Papp (wife of Joseph Papp, founder of The Public Theatre), her three beloved, loyal cats (Poki, PopPop, PomPom) and many loving lifetime friends.”
A born-and-raised New Yorker who came of age in the city’s downtown scene, Martel developed a knack for crafting music videos that were visually striking and filled with thrilling provocations. In 2013, she helmed two of the most discussed and controversial music videos of the past few decades: Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop” and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” with Pharrell and T.I.
Despite the uproar both videos garnered, Martel never blinked. “My shit is on point right now,” she boasted to Rolling Stone that year, adding: “I do have to admit I like being provocative. That’s punk, that’s rock & roll, that’s hip-hop. It’s passionate. We’re not doing pharmaceutical ads.”
Pharrell — who’d worked with Martel before — added, “Diane is like a 17-year-old girl who never grows up. Her creativity continues to evolve.”
Martel was a high school dropout who began her career making performance and street art during the late Eighties and early Nineties. She also worked as a dancer and choreographer, and one of her first big film projects was Reckin’ Shop: Live From Brooklyn, a documentary about hip-hop dancers that aired on PBS in 1992.
That same year, Martel directed her first music video, “Throw Ya Gunz,” for the hardcore hip-hop crew Onyx. She’d work with many other NYC rap luminaries in subsequent years, including Method Man, Gang Starr, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, LL Cool J, and Keith Murray. She also developed a close collaboration with Carey, directing numerous videos for her over the years, including “Dreamlover,” “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” and “My All.”
As Martel’s profile grew, so did the breadth of artists looking to work with her. Even just a smattering of her credits from the late Nineties on offers a survey of the various shapes pop music took as it entered and settled into the new millennium: Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle” and “What a Girl Wants”; D’Angelo’s “Send It On”; Khia’s “My Neck My Back (Lick It)”; Clipse’s “Grindin’”; Justin ‘Timberlake’s “Like I Love You”; Alicia Keys’ “If I Aint’ Got You”; Ciara and Timberlake’s “Love Sex Magic”; Britney Spears’ “3”; the Killers’ “Read My Mind”; the White Stripes’ “Conquest”; Nicki Minaj’s “Pills N Potions”; the 1975’s “Give Yourself a Try”; Addison Rae’s “Obsessed.”
Even with Martel’s massive filmography, 2013 still sticks out for the moment-defining visuals she crafted for Cyrus and Thicke. “Blurred Lines” and “We Can’t Stop” even had a brain-busting moment together when Thicke and Cyrus performed them as a medley at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards alongside dancing teddy bears, a conspicuously overused foam finger, and so, so much twerking. Martel served as the creative director for the performance (and held the same role for Cyrus’ subsequent Bangerz tour).
While both videos were plenty provocative, “Blurred Lines” became the bigger cultural flashpoint. The song’s lyrics sparked a pre-#MeToo debate about sexual violence and consent, issues the sexually explicit video — which starred the models Emily Ratajkowski, Elle Evans, and Jessi M’Bengue — only compounded.
Martel, for her part, told Grantland that she wanted the video to be a counter to the “misogynist, funny lyrics in a way where the girls were going to overpower the men.” She added: “It also forces the men to feel playful and not at all like predators. I directed the girls to look into the camera. This is very intentional and they do it most of the time; they are in the power position. I don’t think the video is sexist. The lyrics are ridiculous; the guys are silly as fuck. That said, I respect women who are watching out for negative images in pop culture and who find the nudity offensive, but I find [the video] meta and playful.”
(Years later, Ratajkowski accused Thicke of sexually harassing her on set, claiming in her memoir that he grabbed her “bare breasts from behind.” Martel corroborated Ratajkowski’s account, telling The Sunday Times, “I screamed in my very aggressive Brooklyn voice, ‘What the fuck are you doing, that’s it! The shoot is over!’ Robin sheepishly apologized. As if he knew it was wrong without understanding how it might have felt for Emily.”)
While Martel’s output slowed a bit in the 2020s, she turned her attention to other pursuits. In 2022, for instance, she was named the Harlan J. Strauss Visiting Filmmaker at the University of Oregon, where she led a series of community events and taught a class on music video production. The last music video Martel directed was for Ciara’s “Ecstasy,” which dropped earlier this year.
Despite her staggering output, Martel was only nominated for Best Direction at the VMAs once: 2005, when she and Francis Lawrence shared the nomination for their work on Jennifer Lopez’s “Get Right.”
In a 2003 interview with Vibe, Martel laid out a kind of artistic philosophy, saying: “I’m concerned with how wack videos are right now. The art of photography and filmmaking is often neglected in favor of repetitive images. How forture are directors every time we’re given an opportunity to represent the culture? How dare we serve people weak shit when hip-hop was born of such strength. Even if there’s a sexual fantasy involved, it doesn’t have to be a lazy, exploitative mess. Good pop art is extremely well crafted and not disposable.”
