Liza Johnson, the art-world filmmaker prestige TV trusts with its quietest hours

Liza Johnson

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	December 13, 1970 Portsmouth, Ohio, United States
Occupation	Film and television director
Known for	Return, Elvis & Nixon, Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie
Awards	Rappaport Prize, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum

In a short essay about the day jobs that keep independent filmmakers afloat, Liza Johnson once listed the oddest benefit of being a tenured art professor. “I literally have a cemetery plot in the faculty cemetery that came with my tenure,” she wrote. “I’m not kidding!” She meant it as a joke about security, and she was also making a serious point: a steady salary, she argued, let her take creative risks. The career that followed reads like a slow walk away from that plot. The video artist who once filmed circus students in her Ohio hometown now directs some of the most closely watched hours of American television, from the episode of The Last of Us that won Storm Reid an Emmy to the embassy corridors of Netflix’s The Diplomat.

The question her work keeps asking is what happens to an artist’s eye when it goes to work on other people’s stories. Her features carry a signature: patient framing, ordinary people under pressure, humour that arrives sideways and never asks for a laugh. Her best-known television hours are chamber pieces built on the same instincts, with two teenage girls alone in a dark shopping mall, or two marriages fraying under one roof on Long Island. Whether those two careers belong to the same filmmaker is the tension running through everything she has made.

Her own story starts in Portsmouth, Ohio, in 1970, the year Elvis Presley turned up at the White House asking for a federal badge, a meeting she would restage on film more than four decades later. She studied visual arts at Williams College in Massachusetts, graduating in 1992, and took an MFA at the University of California, San Diego, in 1995. For years her work belonged to the art world rather than the film business: video installations at Artists Space in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and Mass MoCA, an academic essay on feminist and queer film, curated programmes at Anthology Film Archives and the Asia Society. She went back to Williams to teach film and video, and held fellowships from the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm and the Sundance Institute.

The short films from that period explain the features that came later. Johnson worked with nonprofessional performers in specific places and let the place shape the story. In the Air, selected for the Berlinale Shorts section in 2010, was shot in Portsmouth with students of the town’s Cirque D’Art circus school, blending fiction and documentary into a portrait of a community whose economic crisis began long before the national one. Karrabing! Low Tide Turning, co-directed with the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, took the same method to an Indigenous community in northern Australia. In 2010 the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum gave her its Rappaport Prize, an award for contemporary artists.

Return, her first feature, which she also wrote, went to the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2011 as the only American film in the section that year. Linda Cardellini plays a reservist, wife and mother back from a tour in the Middle East, with Michael Shannon as her husband and John Slattery in support. Cardellini earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for the role. Hateship Loveship followed in 2013, adapted by Mark Poirier from Alice Munro’s story Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. It gave Kristen Wiig her first dramatic lead, as a reserved caregiver pulled into a romance that two teenagers invent for her, opposite Guy Pearce, Hailee Steinfeld and Nick Nolte. Then came Elvis & Nixon in 2016, with Shannon as Presley and Kevin Spacey as the president, built around the Oval Office photograph that remains among the most requested images in the National Archives. It premiered at Tribeca and was released by Amazon Studios and Bleecker Street.

The reception of those films exposes the problem with the auteur reading of her career. Critics admired the restraint and doubted the payoff. Reviewing Hateship Loveship in Toronto, The Playlist argued that her “rigorous and formal approach doesn’t allow for any sparks”; Screen Daily called Elvis & Nixon a “cheeky, forgettable” speculation. The control that made her installations precise could read, at feature length, as reticence. Her most-watched film is the one least like her: Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie, a Netflix spin-off of SpongeBob SquarePants and her first animated feature, which drew 12.8 million views in its opening weekend and mixed reviews. MCM’s own critic found it breezy fun for children, with a live-action blend that never quite clicks. And the hour of hers that people remember best, “Left Behind”, was written by Neil Druckmann. The industry has rewarded her as an interpreter far more than as an author.

Television arrived through comedy. She directed the pilot of Amazon’s Good Girls Revolt, an episode of Ryan Murphy‘s Feud, two of A Series of Unfortunate Events, and episodes of Silicon Valley, Barry, What We Do in the Shadows and Dead to Me. On Physical, the Apple TV+ series starring Rose Byrne, she directed three episodes and served as an executive producer. In 2023 HBO gave her the seventh episode of The Last of Us, a flashback in which Ellie and her friend Riley spend one night in an abandoned mall. Reid won the Emmy for outstanding guest actress in a drama for playing Riley, and credited Johnson, along with Bella Ramsey and Craig Mazin, with shaping the character.

Her steadiest home since then has been The Diplomat. She directed two episodes of its first season in 2023 and two more of the third in 2025, including “Amagansett”, in which Kate Wyler and her husband, now vice president, spend a tense weekend at the president’s Long Island house. That episode earned her a Directors Guild of America nomination for dramatic series in January 2026; the award went to The Pitt. In between, she directed the first four episodes of Shondaland’s White House mystery The Residence for Netflix, two episodes of HBO’s The Franchise and two of the second season of Hulu’s Paradise, released in March 2026. She also teaches directing in the film and television department at UCLA.

Her latest work arrived on Netflix on October 15, 2026, when the fourth season of The Diplomat premiered with Johnson directing its third and fourth episodes, “The Typo” and “Pagliacci”, the stretch that ends with a British prime minister’s resignation. No new feature of her own has been announced. The cemetery plot at Williams is presumably still there, and the filmmaker it was meant for keeps finding reasons to be somewhere else.

Featured Films

Tags: the last of us, The Diplomat, Michael Shannon, Kristen Wiig, Liza Johnson, Elvis & Nixon

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