About
Daniella DeVinter is an Anglo-Danish writer, filmmaker, and academic with an unhealthy interest in stories of sickness and obsession.
She’s neurodivergent and chronically ill, with a chronic sense of humour that helps her make sense of her badly behaved body by telling bad jokes, good stories, and making films.
From movie theatres to lecture theatres and television screens, she reaches audiences around the world, telling one weird tale at a time.
Daniella was born in 1995 in Whitechapel, a delightful district of London once frequented by the serial killer, Jack the Ripper. She spent her childhood between the East End, Denmark, Hampshire, and Cheshire, before heading to Oxford for a degree in German—becoming the first in her family to go to university.
She graduated with the highest grades in her year, the best results in the languages faculty, and an impressive collection of medical diagnoses. It was during her degree that her health took a dramatic and plot-twisty turn, but this was also when she came across a filmmaker named Fassbinder, who’s stuck by her bedside ever since.
In Fassbinder’s hometown of Munich, Daniella worked as a journalist and copy editor for a year, before realising she wanted to be neither. At the risk of losing her sanity, she decided to return to Oxford where she graduated with distinction in a master’s that nobody can remember the name of (‘Comparative Literature and Critical Translation’).
Here she wrote papers about the Nazi film industry and its flagrant copying of Hollywood movies, and her final dissertation was on the annoyingly brilliant American adaptation of her favourite Danish TV series, The Killing. She then defected to Cambridge to write a PhD about the pesky ghost that won’t leave her alone: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. She’s now writing a biography of him.
She speaks English, Danish, and German fluently; French, Norwegian, and Swedish… not so fluently.
Film
Daniella is an award-winning filmmaker, though she has no hopes of keeping up with Fassbinder.
She wrote, directed, and produced Unwell Woman (2024), a gothic horror dealing with the monstrous legacy of hysteria, and has won awards for her one-woman-show shorts.
She has directed independent music videos, and made documentaries about women’s health for the Headspace app (she’s also written Sleepcasts—bedtime stories for grown-ups—for the app’s US, UK, and German markets).
Television
In her spare time, Daniella writes crime dramas for major TV broadcasters including Channel 4 and PBS—from gutsy women battling drug cartels (Before We Die, 2023) to neurodivergent murder investigators (Patience, 2025).
Academia
Daniella has over a decade’s experience teaching languages, literature, and film. She’s given lectures and seminars for Oxford’s ‘Modern German Literature’ paper and Cambridge’s ‘Comparative Film’ paper, which are much more exciting than they sound.
She’s taught a wide range of subjects including, but not limited to, Kafka’s insomnia; Freud’s cocaine stash; Maya Deren’s hair; and Adorno’s grumpy critique of the culture industry.
Daniella’s main hobby is insomnia, though she occasionally dabbles in sleeping.