Despina Ladi
Writer
Despina Ladi is an award-winning Greek screenwriter and script editor based in London.
She has worked on films that have screened in Oscar and BAFTA qualifying festivals such as Tribeca, Sarajevo and Karlovy Vary.
She has collaborated with British screenwriter Tony Grisoni on various film and TV projects, including Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope for HBO.
Her debut feature screenplay 17 Moments of Summer received development funding from the Slovenian Film Centre and was selected for Crossroads, the co-production forum of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival.
She is co-writing, with writer-director Dania Bdeir, the dramedy TV series Rent-a-Mama. The project received development funding from Canada Media Fund, Bell Media and the CBC, and a Doha Film Institute grant. It was selected for the 2023 Series Mania Writers Campus, the 2023 TorinoFilmLab Series Lab, the 2024 DFI Series Lab and 2025 Qumra.
In 2025 Despina took part in the writers’ room and was the script editor on the European co-production crime thriller TV series Brothers, supported by Creative Europe, among others.
Since 2021 she has been evaluating film and TV projects as a script reader for the Greek Film Centre and was also part of the selection Jury for the Ministry of Culture’s funding scheme The Future Is Here.
As a journalist, Despina’s work has featured in leading international publications including The Guardian, Sight & Sound, La Repubblica and The Huffington Post, while her monthly column Life: Two or Three Things I Know About It, was published into a book.
She holds a BA in Media and Communications from the University of Athens and an MA in Screenwriting from the London Film School and she has taken screenwriting courses at NYU.
She is an alumna of Series Mania, Berlinale Talents, TorinoFilmLab, Doha Film Institute, MFI Script 2 Film, AdaptLab, Sarajevo Talents and Sundance Collab.
In 2023 she was selected for BAFTA Connect - BAFTA’s career development programme supporting future creative leaders in the film and TV industry.
In 2025 she was selected as a mentee for the Wonder Women mentoring programme, the UK industry’s only year-long programme empowering the next generation of female leaders.