DR JOYCE DATILES is a writer / director, multidisciplinary artist and historian whose work spans film, art and immersive storytelling. She was awarded the prestigious Folger Shakespeare Institute Fellowship to develop her Elizabethan adventure series, THE LANDLORD'S DARK- HAIRED DAUGHTER. Her medieval historical epic, SCEPTRE was supported by the Sundance Institute and selected for the BFI Network Producers Lab with the Independent Cinema Office.
Joyce co-founded the Cardiff-based immersive arts production company, FUTURE FANTASY ARTS in 2024 and the mixed media arts collective, THE SPECTACLE MAKERS PRODUCTIONS based at Somerset House in 2018. Her work has been funded by the Arts Council and the AHRC, screening at Cannes Film Festival, Sundance London, PRADA, Saatchi Art, VOGUE and Open City Docs. Her short, AND WHEN OUR BOTTLES AND ALL WE // ARE FILLED WITH IMMORTALITY screened in the Dora Maar exhibit at Tate Modern with UNIQLO Lates.
In 2024 Joyce won Curtis Brown Creative’s Breakthrough YA & Children’s Fiction Writer of Colour Scholar for her fantasy novel-in-progress about forgotten SE Asian and Welsh myths, MOON FIGHT. She was recipient of the 2025 Media Cymru Innovation Pipeline Research & Development Grant to adapt MOON FIGHT into a virtual reality (VR) game starring Tom Cullen (HOUSE OF DRAGON) and Aneurin Barnard (THE WHITE QUEEN), currently in postproduction. MOON FIGHT was initially developed as a television pilot with BAD WOLF TV x The Other Room Theatre Emerging Writers 2021 and competed in the Final 4 of the AmazonPrime WriterSlam 2021.
Joyce is currently executive producer of THE NET, a short film shot in the Philippines, backed by the British Council’s Connections Through Culture Grant. She is a 2026 Virtual Production Fellow at Final Pixel Studios and a 2025 Sundance Cultural Impact Fellowship finalist. Joyce was selected for the 2024 TV Collective’s Breakthrough Leaders sponsored by BBC Studios, AmazonPrime, ITV, Fremantle and Sky.
She is an alumna of BAFTA Connect, CreativeUK Industry Equals: Women in Screen, TorinoFilmLab, DirectorsUK Inspire, Young Vic Theatre Directors and Cambridge Film Festival Writers Lab.
Alongside her creative career Joyce is a historian. She holds a PhD in history and visual anthropology / documentary film from UCL and graduated from Oxford, Cambridge and Georgetown. She’s been a volunteer UN Women UK delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women since 2021, her poetry included in Sexual Harassment, An Anthology published by UN Women and Poets Versus. Her work, both creative and academic, aims to amplify diverse voices and heroes who have been excluded from history. She works between London, Cardiff and Oxford.