Vanessa-Faye Stanley is a director, movement director, dramaturg and actor. Half-French with Caribbean roots, she has a Masters in Shakespeare studies (based at the Globe) and trained two years at Jacques Lecoq in Paris, working across the UK, France, Lebanon and Australia.

As artistic director of Boileroom, she received the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Award for bold, innovative theatre, with The Terrific Electric (Barbican, 2007). She was associate movement director on the all-female site-specific Richard III (Wales Millennium Centre, 2015) and has devised work with directors Chris Goode and Emma Rice; Punchdrunk; ENO and performed with theatres such as the National Theatre and the Royal Exchange. Nominated best actress at the Welsh National Theatre Awards (2016), she performs and writes for film and comedy, co-creating The History Girls (Objective Productions/ BBC Comedy online) and winning the UK Sitcom Trials (Gilded Balloon, 2016). As director, her short films have premiered at the London short Film Festival (2016). She was a script-reader for Hampstead theatre and guest lecturer in performance at Northampton University.