Biography
Deva is in pre-production with Finding Clive, a romantic comedy feature film, set to shoot this year, starring Shirley Henderson (Trainspotting, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Harry Potter) Roger Allam (The Hippopotamus, The Thick of it, The Lady in the Van) and Gemma Jones (Bridget Jones’s Baby, Sense and Sensibility, Marvellous) with Alison Sterling of Ignition Films, Farah Abushwesha and Katie O'Mahoney on board as producers. Finding Clive was selected from over 7,200 feature film scripts as a quarterfinalist for the Academy Nicholl Fellowship 2013, second rounder at Austin Film Festival 2013 and 2012. Deva originally trained as an actress at Guildhall School of Music and Drama with a BP Scholarship and later, went on to spend the summer studying filmmaking at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, on a William and Eva Fox Fellowship. Her short films have been selected for many awards including a Silver Plaque at Chicago International Film Festival and a BBC New Filmmakers award. Fishy, distributed by Shorts International, was selected as one of twenty outstanding British short films for an online film festival in October 2014 in China and can be found on iTunes. In 2006, Deva was mentored by Gurinder Chadha for a year on the Guiding Lights scheme, which inspired her to set up the ICA Lab – a script development lab where she developed her feature film scripts, Baby, Finding Clive and The Garden. Deva is also developing Raya, a black comedy feature film, which has Gemma Whelan (Game of Thrones, Mapp and Lucia, Dark Vanilla Jungle) interested in playing the leading role, with Katie O'Mahoney and Alex Thiele of 65 Wilding Films on board as producers. Raya was selected for an Advanced Mentoring Lab at the London Screenwriter's Festival 2015. Most recently, Deva has been awarded a first class degree, studying an MA in feature filmmaking at Bath Spa University.
