Diane Martel, Inventive Director of Music Videos, Dies at 63

Diane Martel, the prolific music video director who helped visually define the work of megastars like Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake and Mariah Carey, and who stood out as a woman in a field dominated by men, died on Thursday. She was 63.

Her aunt Gail Merrifield Papp said she died of breast cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan.

Unafraid to push the boundaries in an especially inventive medium, Ms. Martel was for decades among the most sought-after video directors in the music industry. She directed videos for a broad and eclectic group of big-name artists, including The 1975, Franz Ferdinand, Method Man, the White Stripes, Mobb Deep, Jennifer Lopez and Avril Lavigne.

Ms. Martel frequently collaborated with the pop star Miley Cyrus, directing her “Younger Now” and “Malibu” videos, both in 2017, and serving as the creative director for Ms. Cyrus’s “Bangerz” tour in 2014.

In a phone interview on Saturday, Ms. Papp described her niece as “self-invented,” having forged her own path as a video director after dropping out of high school.

“She has a permanent legacy, which she pioneered, starting with her early days of music videos,” Ms. Papp said, adding that she had initially experimented with the medium in her bedroom.

Ms. Papp credited her niece’s “innate sense of the dramatic” for the success of her music videos.

Ms. Martel’s break came in 1992, when she directed the PBS documentary “Wreckin’ Shop: Live From Brooklyn,” which tracked the evolution of hip-hop dancing in New York.

In 2013, Ms. Martel directed two of the most talked-about videos of the decade: Ms. Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop,” a rebellious and sexually charged song whose video depicted a louche house party, and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” which many viewers deemed sexist and misogynistic. (An unrated version of the video was banned from YouTube.)

In an interview that year with The New York Times, Ms. Martel said that with “Blurred Lines” she’d wanted to show women using the power of their physical beauty to mock the clothed male singers. “It’s a romp; it’s for adults,” she said. “They are actually ridiculing the men. It’s hysterical.”

She added that record labels were exerting less control over her videos than they had in the 1990s.

“At the top of the chain,” she said, “you don’t have people trying to curate complicated, thoughtful work.”

Ms. Martel once described her video style as minimalist, telling the sports and pop-culture publication Grantland in 2013 that her choices were designed to put artists front and center.

“They have to perform because there is not a lot else going on,” she said. “They feel this on set, and the way I shoot invites them to contribute a lot. Some songs are about sex, some moments in careers are about sex. If it’s called for, we go there.”

Diane Martel was born May 7, 1962, in Brooklyn to Philip and Marsha Martel. After dropping out of high school, she became a dancer and choreographer, according to People.

According to Ms. Papp, Ms. Martel did not marry or have children. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. Her uncle Joseph Papp, Ms. Papp’s husband who died in 1991, founded the Public Theater in New York.

One of Ms. Martel’s final music videos was for “Ecstasy,” by Ciara, according to Billboard. The understated video, which was released in April, focused on the singer’s titillating dance moves without backup dancers.

Ciara said in a tribute on Instagram on Friday that she had known Ms. Martel for nearly 20 years and that Ms. Martel had also directed videos for her songs “Promise” and “Ride.”

“You believed in me, and I believed in you,” Ciara wrote, adding that she would be “forever grateful for all the magic” they had made together.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.