JOYCE DATILES is a writer/director, producer and historian whose work spans art, film, and immersive storytelling. She was a 2025 Sundance Cultural Impact Fellowship finalist and is a 2026 Virtual Production Fellow at Final Pixel Studios. She was selected for the 2024 TV Collective’s Breakthrough Leaders, sponsored by BBC Studios, AmazonPrime, ITV, Fremantle and Sky. Her experimental films and art have exhibited at Cannes, Sundance, PRADA, Saatchi Art, VOGUE, TATE Modern and Open City Docs. She is currently executive producer of upcoming short film, THE NET directed by Lorna Nickson-Brown. THE NET is a British-Filipino co-production funded by the British Council and the Film Development Council of the Philippines. Filmed in the Philippines and Scotland in August and September 2025, THE NET serves as a springboard for a long-form project currently in development.
Joyce won the 2024 Curtis Brown Creative Breakthrough YA & Children’s Fiction Writer of Colour for her fantasy novel-in-progress about forgotten SE Asian and Welsh myths, MOON FIGHT. She won the 2024/25 Media Cymru Innovation Pipeline's "Strength in Places" R & D Fund to adapt MOON FIGHT into a VR game and series starring Aneurin Barnard (DOCTOR WHO) and Tom Cullen (HOUSE OF DRAGON). MOON FIGHT XR is currently in postproduction.
Joyce was shortlisted for the 2024 Penguin Michael Joseph Undiscovered Writers Prize. She is recipient of the prestigious Folger Shakespeare Institute Fellowship to develop her Elizabethan era television show, THE LANDLORD'S DARK-HAIRED DAUGHTER. Her historical epic, SCEPTRE was supported by the Sundance Institute and optioned by the History Channel.
Joyce is an alum of BAFTA Connect, Sundance Documentary Lab, CreativeUK Industry Equals: Women in Screen, TorinoFilmLab, DirectorsUK Inspire, The Other Room Theatre x Bad Wolf TV Emerging Writers, Young Vic Theatre Directors and Cambridge Film Festival Writers Lab with the British Film Institute.
She is co-founder of Cardiff-based production company, FUTURE FANTASY ARTS as well as the mixed media arts collective, THE SPECTACLE MAKERS PRODUCTIONS based in Somerset House, supported by the Mayor of London’s Good Growth Fund through the Somerset House Trust for founders of colour.
Alongside her creative career, Joyce is an ancient historian and visual anthropologist. She holds an AHRC-sponsored dual doctorate from UCL. Prior to UCL she graduated from Oxford, Cambridge and Georgetown. Both her creative and academic endeavors aim to amplify diverse voices and heroes that have been excluded from history. She works between Cardiff and London.