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 shorts have exhibited at Cannes, Sundance London, PRADA, Saatchi Art, VOGUE, TATE Modern and Open City Docs. She is currently an associate producer of THE NET, a short film written and directed by Lorna Nickson-Brown and backed by the British Council currently in production in the Philippines and Scotland.
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. Joyce won the 2024/25 Media Cymru Innovation Pipeline R & D Grant to adapt MOON FIGHT into a VR game and series starring Aneurin Barnard (DR WHO, TIMESTALKER).
She was shortlisted the 2024 Penguin Michael Joseph Undiscovered Writers Prize and 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 won a full scholarship from the Sundance Institute and was optioned by the History Channel.
Joyce is an alumna 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 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 and graduated from Oxford, Cambridge and Georgetown. She has been a volunteer UN Women UK delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women since 2021. Her work, both creative and academic, aims to amplify diverse voices and heroes that have been excluded from history.