Joseph Lawrence Scanlan (August 16, 1929 - December 18, 2020) was an American film and television director who directed episodes of popular TV shows such as Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, What's Happening!!, Spenser: For Hire, Falcon Crest, Land of the Lost, and also the NBC-TV soap operas Somerset and Another World in the early 1970s. He also directed four episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation during its first and second seasons, and also, an episode of Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict.

Scanlan was nominated for a Gemini Award for Best Direction in a Dramatic Program or Mini-Series (The Outer Limits) in 1995. He directed the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Big Goodbye", which won a Peabody Award in 1987.

He directed 7 episodes of the revival series from 1995 to 1996:

• "Virtual Future"
• "The Message"
• "Unnatural Selection"
• "Straight and Narrow"
• "Inconstant Moon"
• "The Deprogrammers"
• "The Sentence"