Jennifer Venditti Knows ‘It’ When She Sees It

Several decades before Jennifer Venditti became one of the most in-demand casting directors in Hollywood—a woman known for her uncanny ability to pick a potential scene-stealer out of the crowd at, say, a nerd-packed anime convention or an acne-blighted high school cafeteria—she orchestrated her own casting, at a Midwestern shopping mall. It was the dawn of the ’90s, and Venditti, who grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, was a student at Chicago’s International Academy of Merchandising and Design when she heard that one of her idols, the designer Anna Sui, would be making a local in-store appearance. With her boyfriend in tow and her résumé in hand, Venditti dressed herself (and her man, who happened to be a model) in the most eye-catching vintage she could get her hands on—“I was really obsessed with the whole grunge thing,” she says—and headed to the event, where she waited for her moment. Sure enough, Sui approached. “She liked what we were wearing,” Venditti remembers. Over the course of a quick conversation, Venditti expressed her desire to land a summer internship in the New York fashion world. Sui instructed her to fax her résumé to Keeble Cavaco & Duka, one of the top fashion PR and production firms (now known as KCD), and within weeks Venditti was working under the agency’s runway producer, Nian Fish, on a Calvin Klein show. She dressed models backstage and spent hours with the brand’s head of show production, the soon-to-be Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. She never made it back to school in Chicago.

After two years at KCD, where she did “a little bit of everything” but ultimately concentrated on casting, Venditti left to assist the stylist Lori Goldstein. It was, in many ways, a dream job. “I was traveling around the world with all the top photographers, doing stuff with Madonna and Annie Leibovitz,” she says. But she eventually got frustrated by what she saw as the industry’s closed-minded lack of creativity when it came to models. “It was rules and dogma and trends: Someone’s saying this is what it is, and then everyone else is doing their version of that. First it was Brazilian beauty, then Belgian beauty.…” One day, she was working on a magazine cover shoot, and “I just looked around and thought, I can’t do this anymore.” She decided to start her own agency, hoping to encourage a more expansive definition of beauty through street casting.

Her timing was spot-on. With the supermodel era winding down and reality TV on the rise, stylists and photographers were realizing that so-called regular people (who were more often not actually “regular” but in some way unusual looking) could be an especially compelling addition to fashion shoots. One of the first to embrace the idea was W’s creative director at the time, Dennis Freedman, who hired Venditti to cast some of the magazine’s most elaborate fashion stories. Whereas today “we have the street through Instagram,” says Venditti, in those pre–social media days, street casting involved marathons of pavement-pounding. She combed Brazilian favelas in search of interesting faces for a story by Philip-Lorca diCorcia and scoured Penn State for a David Sims portfolio set at the school. Her most memorable trip, she says, was to Appalachia, where she befriended a young mother of five named Melissa and cast her in the 1998 Peter Lindbergh story “Coal Country.” “The magazine sent me all over the world with a Polaroid, and I just got to explore,” Venditti remembers. “Dennis never even gave me guidelines. It was just, ‘Find what you think is beautiful, what you think is interesting.’ ”

A casting trip to Maine in 2006 led to her film career. There, she struck up a conversation at a high school lunch table with a 15-year-old social outlier named Billy Price, whom his classmates described as “a total weirdo.” Venditti was entranced by his unfiltered honesty and off-kilter outlook and decided to make a documentary about him. “I wanted to experience the world through his eyes,” she says. Billy the Kid was released in 2007, and, Venditti says, “I started getting calls from, like, Spike Jonze and Ryan Gosling. Everyone was kind of just like, ‘I love the way you see the world. Will you populate my world like that?’ ”

Venditti’s most serendipitous connection came via a screening of the doc at the South by Southwest festival, in Austin, Texas, where she noticed two brothers playing pool. “I thought they were so cute, and I think I tried to scout them,” she says, laughing. It turns out they were the then-unknown auteurs Josh and Benny Safdie, with whom she’s now worked on multiple films, including the duo’s Uncut Gems in 2019 and Josh’s Marty Supreme in 2025, for which Venditti was nominated for the inaugural Oscar in the category of casting.

Finding actors for a film or television show, says Venditti—who’s also known for her work on the HBO series Euphoria—is very different from casting a fashion shoot. For still photography, “you just look for a face, photograph the face, and then you get their contact info.” With a movie, “you have to get a performance out of them.” The first step, she says, is building trust with a person, which she does over the course of several in-depth, interview-esque conversations. When she’s dealing with nonactors, the idea isn’t to determine whether they can act, but “to see if there’s anything from their own life that they can bring to the role,” she says. “My whole thing is, I’m trying to create the cinema of life.” Most of all, she says, she’s looking for a compelling, magnetic singularity that might be described as “star quality,” but that she calls simply “authenticity.” The ability to spot it has been the key to her success. “The strongest tool that I have is instinct,” she says. “I can just kind of feel, This person has ‘it.’ I can literally feel it in my body.”

Hair by Junya Nakashima for Oribe at Streeters; makeup by Romy Soleimani at eArtists; fashion assistant: Sofia Prochilo; makeup assistant: Jackie Piccola.