Marsha Chesley has been a casting director for more than forty years and has worked in every medium: feature films, movies-of-the-week, dramatic series, sitcoms, corporate videos, and commercials.

Instrumental in creating the Gemini Award for Best Achievement in Casting, Marsha was nominated for the award in its inaugural year for her work on the CBC series This is Wonderland. She then won the award in 2009 for her work on The Line. She was nominated a third time in 2011 for the TMN series Living in Your Car.

Marsha is the immediate past co-chair of the Casting Directors Society of Canada, a position she held for more than 20 years. She also served on the Professional Advisory Committee of the Theatre School at George Brown College, for 20 years, as well as the same committee for the School of Media Studies for 7 years. In addition she is a long standing member of the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television.

Marsha's most recent television series include Untold Stories of the ER for TLN, King for Shaw Media, and the acclaimed Little Mosque on the Prairie for CBC. Other recent credits include a film about the life of Canada's first Prime Minister called John A: The Rivals and a rare involvement in documentary, Air India 182, written and directed by Sturla Gunnarson for CBC. In four seasons (52 episodes) of the Global television series Blue Murder, she garnered twenty-five Gemini nominations for actors. In three seasons of the critically-acclaimed series This Is Wonderland, also written by George F. Walker and Dani Romain, 29 actors were nominated for Gemini awards.

Recent feature films include:


• The Incident Report, written and directed by Naomi Jaye

• Heaven on Earth, written and directed by Deepa Mehta

• Niagara Motel, produced by Bernard Zukerman and written by George F. Walker and Dani Romain

• Julie Walking Home, written and directed by Agnieszka Holland

• Love Come Down and Rude, both by Clement Virgo

• The Hanging Garden which won the Air Canada People's Choice Award and tied for Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto International Film Festival, 1997

• Top of the Food Chain with Campbell Scott

• Timothy Findley's The Piano Man's Daughter starring Stockard Channing

A productive collaboration with producer Bernard Zukerman and director Jerry Ciccoritti has resulted in four movies-of-the-week: The Many Trials of One Jane Doe, The Death and Life of Nancy Eaton, and two Chasing Cain police dramas.

Other movies-of-the-week include the recent Plague City, Playing House, Tripping the Wire, and Hunt For Justice: The Louise Arbour Story all for CTV. Early CBC work includes Charlie Grant's War, directed by Martin Lavut; Canada's Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks, and The King Chronicle both by Donald Brittain; The Wordsmith and The Street both directed by Claude Jutra; four seasons of Seeing Things, and the final two seasons of King of Kensington.

Fluent in French, Marsha has also helped in the casting of projects for a number of prominent French-Canadian directors including André Melançon, Robert Ménard, and Robert Lepage.

For three years Marsha was Casting Director-in-Residence at the CANADIAN FILM CENTRE. She teaches workshops and is called upon frequently to give seminars to actors as well as producers, directors, and writers, at all the major theatre schools in Toronto and at SIFT: The Summer Institute of Film and Television in Ottawa. She has also written a best-selling book on auditioning for film and television. You Got the Part!

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