Biografi
Dana Joiner has spent the last 15 years in the entertainment industry as a writer, producer, assistant director, and content creator, focusing primarily on female-centered stories. Originally from Texas, she began her career in Los Angeles after relocating from New York by creating and executive producing the first and only live broadcast scripted comedy series on Facebook Live and Periscope. The quirky scripted farce, Houghton Heights, was groundbreaking in allowing viewers to tweet and instant message during the show to influence the storyline in real-time. This project also led to her meeting her writing partner.
Currently, Dana co-creates alongside fellow Southern native Heidi-Marie Ferren. Their shared passion for women’s contributions in the twentieth century has resulted in scripted hour-long dramas such as Woman Enough/Unsung, an award-winning series at the Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline Nashville Film Festival. The series, which explores the early women of country music, has been described as "the MADMEN of these women" and is actively being shopped. The duo was recently hired to develop and co-write the KEPS Mystery Series for television and streaming, based on an optioned book series. This project has garnered positive attention, with Tanya Tucker and Wynonna Judd attached to star as an amateur sleuth crime-fighting pair.
Dana and Heidi are also developing two biopic features with all rights secured: How-DEE: Once an Oversight, Now a Trademark, about legendary female comedian Minnie Pearl, and A Woman Before Her Time: The Jackie Shane Story, which tells the tale of the transgender pioneer and first chart-topping trans woman of color in 1960s soul and rhythm & blues. Beyond Woman Enough, Dana holds the rights to and is developing American Havoc, a one-hour drama exploring the provocative, untold story of June Havoc and Gypsy Rose Lee during the Depression-era vaudeville and entertainment revolution that shaped America.
As an author, Dana’s forthcoming historical fiction novel—based on the untold story of the first flight attendants post-WWII, the 1940s women who inspired the iconic Playboy Bunny suit with wings—has already attracted interest for adaptation into a limited series. On camera, Dana has appeared in HBO’s Togetherness, ABC’s American Crime, and held a principal role as Natalie opposite Robert Davi in the film 8 Winds. She was recently slated to co-write Overton Film’s Martin Luther King documentary about the first MLK parade in East Texas and consulted on a controversial feature about the first University production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in the Bible Belt.
Dana is a devoted supporter of the Scottish Rite Children's Hospital, where she underwent surgery for clubfoot—a birth defect caused by her parent’s exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War—at 18 months old. Thanks to the skilled surgeons there, she learned to walk and dance as a child, a debt of gratitude she honors with every opportunity she receives.
