Amanda M Nevarez

Amanda M. Nevarez is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, producer, and Directors Guild of America member with over 15 years of experience across film, television, and new media. A native of Southern California, she brings a performance-driven, psychologically grounded approach to storytelling, equally at home with sharp comedy, intimate drama, and genre work.

She didn't walk through the front door. She started in background work, then landed a security job on the Maria Conchita Alonso show, where two brothers, Manny and Danny, watched her and told her to pay attention to the cameras. She did. She applied for a PA position and ended up an AD. Then she learned producing. Then line producing, after watching a friend get charged a hundred dollars for a copy of a CD and deciding she needed to understand exactly what every job was worth so no one around her would ever be taken advantage of again. She jumped into every department, not to collect titles but to understand the work from the inside. What it costs. What it takes. What it's actually worth.

She got into the DGA while working on Blippi's Treehouse, a low budget kids' show that landed her on the Low Budget list. Then she got into the Television Academy. And somewhere in there, after nearly twenty years of learning everyone else's job, she decided it was time to do her own.

As an AD she directed more times than anyone logged. Her philosophy never changed: the actor knows their character. Her job was to make them feel safe enough to live inside it. She was never there to impose. She was there to hold the space.

Then came 2019, the DGA, and everything after. Covid. The strikes. The Eaton Fire. The kind of years that either break you or clarify exactly what you are doing and why. She kept building. Part of that building has been developing her own visual language using AI-assisted tools, not to make films, but to communicate mood, tone, and texture before a camera ever rolls. The same instinct that drove her to learn every department: understand the tools so you can use them precisely.

Her debut short Sally White has earned multiple awards on the international festival circuit, including the Bronze Telly Award at the 47th Annual Telly Awards, Best Short Film First Place at the 24th Urban Mediamakers Film Festival, and Best Comedy at the LA Film Awards. Off set she is just as likely to be elbow-deep in camp infrastructure at Burning Man, where her friends know her as Meow Meow, as she is at a DGA screening or dropping into a random improv scenario with friends. She moves between those worlds without changing who she is in any of them. That is also why people call her when they need to know who to call.

She is a member of NALIP, Alliance of Women Directors, Chicana Directors Initiative, Film Fatales, and Women in Media. Catch her at the right moment and she is either scribbling down a new script idea on whatever is nearby, working a room to connect two people who needed to meet, or already thinking three projects ahead. The bigger picture is always the point.