Brian Dannelly

Brian Dannelly is a German-born American film director and screenwriter best known for his work on the 2004 film Saved!

Early life Dannelly was born in Würzburg, Germany then moved with his family to Baltimore, Maryland at age 11. He was raised Catholic; he attended a Catholic elementary school, Arlington Baptist High School in Baltimore, and a Jewish summer camp. He was expelled from first grade for hitting a nun, and later expelled from high school—which he describes as "one of the strictest schools in the nation" —for excessive demerits. He came out at the age of 17 and was thrown out of his house by his parents, who eventually came to accept his sexuality.

Career Dannelly wrote and directed the short film "He Bop" in 2000, and in 2004, he made the feature film Saved!, which he directed and co-wrote with Michael Urban. He had begun to write the Saved! script after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, which he claims took him "back to [his] roots" in a Christian high school. He and Urban began writing the script while attending the American Film Institute Conservatory. Much of the story was drawn from his own experiences with "conservative Christian subculture", including Christian rock concerts, being "this gay kid in a Christian school" and having visions of Jesus. He claims that nothing in the film came from his imagination: "Everything in the movie comes from either something I experienced, or something I witnessed, or something I researched." He has written the spec script titled Army Geek.

In 2017, Dannelly worked as a director on two episodes of the second season of the Netflix series Haters Back Off, starring Colleen Ballinger (Miranda Sings), Angela Kinsey and Erik Stocklin.