Daniel Y-Li Grove

Daniel Y-Li Grove is a Singaporean-Australian writer-director-producer. He graduated from the University of Southern California’s MFA program with the Panavision Young Filmmaker Award for his thesis “A Better Place Than This”, about the hangman of Changi prison and his affair with a woman on death row, which became the flagship short on PBS.

Prior to that Daniel wrote the student Oscar finalist “Blackbird” about Mexican-American tweens coming of age in South Central LA. He formed the company Black Light District which produced the Sundance darling “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night”, and followed up with his feature directorial debut “The Persian Connection”, which The Financial Times called “the most striking of films, which spiked the tonic of open-mindedness with firewater.”

Daniel subsequently optioned the series to FX and began pre-production on the feature version of “A Better Place Than This” starring Andrea Riseborough when the pandemic hit. The project took part in the London Film Finance Market in 2019 and Zurich Film Festival Talents 2018. He is currently adapting the best-selling prison memoir “The Sunday Smuggler” and producing the female heist thriller “Be Not Afraid” starring Jena Malone, Kathleen Turner and William Hurt (shooting end of 2021). Prior to film Daniel was a print journalist in Singapore, Australia and China and has been published in the Sydney Morning Herald, Dazed & Confused, Frankie, Arena, JUICE and VICE. He majored in philosophy, film studies and media & communications for his BA at the University of Sydney.

Daniel Y-Li Grove: Screenwriter & Director

Agent:  Marinus Viktor