Michael Yanny has spent his life making things that are funny, strange, and occasionally both at once.
He is a writer, director and comic performer with a distinctively absurdist sensibility. The kind that finds the joke hiding inside the drama, and the humanity hiding inside the joke. His work has screened at BFI London Film Festival, Raindance, Encounters and Flickerfest. He won the LOCO Discovery Award for his short film Just Desserts. He has directed for Channel 4, created branded content for BBC, Netflix, Sky and beyond. Every month he curates, performs and hosts Lose Your Marbles at the Canal Café Theatre, West London's premier fringe comedy night, held at the venue where the League of Gentlemen and The Mighty Boosh first found their feet. A night where he has personally given a stage to Edinburgh Comedy Award winners and nominees, Malcolm Hardee Award winners and nominees, BAFTA winners and some of the most thrillingly unpredictable acts working in British comedy today.
He has a genuine gift with actors. He casts boldly and diversely, draws out performances that feel less like acting and more like truth catching fire, and has a particular instinct for finding the comedy that lives in real people rather than types.
His debut feature Dee-Day is optioned and heading to market. Two TV comedies are in development. Things are moving.
At the heart of how he works is a belief in play. Not play as an indulgence, but play as the most direct route to something real. The most memorable things he has made did not arrive with the biggest budgets. They arrived when talented people were given permission to be surprising. That is where the connection happens. That is where audiences lean in.
If your project needs that kind of thinking, you are in the right place.