Jill Daniels


Dr Jill Daniels is an award-winning British independent filmmaker and a Senior Lecturer in Film at University of East London.

Early life

Daniels was born in Manchester, Lancashire, England and comes from a Jewish family of Romanian and Russian extraction. Leaving school at 16 and home when still a teenager and uncertain of what route her future career should take, she spent some time in Spain, working as a disco dancer and DJ in Madrid and Bilbao, as well as tending bar at the Fat Black Pussy Cat in the Carihuela, Torremolinos. Returning to England she became a single parent and studied fine art at Wimbledon School of Art. She received an M.A. in Film and Television from the Royal College of Art, London and gained her PhD at the University of East London. She was a founding member and the London Secretary of the Independent Filmmakers Association.

Career

During the 1980s, Daniels worked for several years with the single homeless. As a fighter for women’s rights she joined the Working Women’s Charter Campaign and edited the newspaper Women’s Fight, from 1977 to 1981 where only women worked and that she says “gradually turned me into a political journalist.” In 1991 she was a jury member of the Huesca International Film Festival, Spain. She sees herself as an oppositional filmmaker, working outside the mainstream film and television industry. She co-edited and wrote a chapter for the book Truth, Dare or Promise: Art and Documentary Revisited, Cambridge Scholars, London. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Media Practice.
Daniels' work has been shown, amongst others, at the Barbican, London, the National Film Theatre, London; the Cinematheque, Lisbon; the Flea Pit, London and at the film festivals Expanded Cinema, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Feminale, Cologne, Germany; Astra Film Festival, Sibiu, Romania; Athens International Film & Video Festival, Ohio, US; Creteil, France; Nuoro, Sardinia; Taipei, Taiwan; British Film Festival, Los Angeles; Ann Arbor, USA. In 2011 she toured Australia with her updated version of Next Year in Lerin.
Her films are distributed by 10 Francs, France; National Film Network, US; Cinenova, UK and can be seen on Vimeo.

Awards and grants

Grants from the Hubert Bals Fund, Rotterdam Film Festival; The Open Society Human Rights Film Fund now incorporated into the Sundance Film Festival; South East Arts, UK; Northern Arts, UK; Border Television, UK; Macedonian Human Rights Society, Canada; Report International Ltd
My Private Life II 25 mins. colour, video
My Private Life 63 mins. colour, video