About

Daniella DeVinter is an Anglo-Danish writer, filmmaker, and recovering academic with an unhealthy interest in bad behaviour — particularly of the bodily, cinematic, and German variety.

In her spare time, which she treats recklessly, her main hobby is insomnia, though she has been known to dabble in sleeping.

Born in 1995 in Whitechapel, a charming district of London once frequented by Jack the Ripper, Daniella grew up between England and Denmark before absconding to Oxford to study German. She was the first in her family to go to university, graduating with the highest grades in her year and more medical diagnoses than strictly necessary.

It was during her degree that she came across a filmmaker named Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who’s refused to leave her bedside ever since.

In Munich, Fassbinder’s hometown, Daniella worked as a journalist and copy editor before realising she wanted to be neither. So she decided to return to Oxford and graduate with distinction in a master’s that nobody can remember the name of (‘Comparative Literature and Critical Translation’).

There, among other things, she wrote about the Nazi film industry’s copycatting of Hollywood movies, and finished a dissertation on the annoyingly brilliant American adaptation of the Danish TV series, The Killing.

Then she defected to Cambridge to write a PhD about the pesky ghost who won’t leave her alone. She’s now writing a freewheeling book about Fassbinder’s life and films for Faber & Faber, while also making an autofictional documentary about him.

She speaks English, Danish, and German fluently. French, Norwegian, and Swedish… less so.

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 about the monstrous afterlife of hysteria, and has won awards for her increasingly unhinged one-woman-show shorts.

She’s directed music videos and made documentaries about women’s wellbeing in partnership with Headspace Health, and has also written Sleepcasts (bedtime stories for grown-ups) for Headspace’s US, UK, and German audiences.

Television

Daniella writes crime dramas for major 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, both of which are considerably more exciting than they sound.

She’s taught on a wide range of subjects including Kafka’s insomnia, Freud’s cocaine habit, Maya Deren’s hair, and Adorno’s grumpy critique of the culture industry.

Scholarships & Prizes

  • Open-Oxford-Cambridge scholarship for doctoral research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

  • Highest First in languages faculty. First in all examinations (Finals).

  • Highest First in languages faculty. First in all examinations (Prelims).

  • Highest First across all Arts subjects.

  • Awarded for a First in every examination (BA in German, Finals).

  • Highest-scoring Oral Examination in the German department.

  • Awarded by Worcester College for the highest first in the language faculty’s preliminary examinations.