Daniel Larlham is a theatre-maker and performance researcher with a Ph.D. in Theatre from Columbia University and an M.F.A. from NYU’s Graduate Acting Program.
Daniel has held academic appointments at UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, Yale University’s Theater Studies Program, and Saint Mary’s College of California’s Performing Arts Department. He has also taught and conducted research at the Freie Universität Berlin (as a Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow) and the University of Roehampton, London (as a Fulbright Scholar). His articles and reviews have appeared in TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, Theater (Yale), Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. Daniel’s current research interests include drama and psychology, heroes and the heroic, and performance and ecology. His ongoing research project, “Heroism in the Anthropocene,” examines environmental activism from a mytho-dramatic perspective.
During his years in New York City, Daniel performed regularly with “downtown” experimental theatre companies Les Freres Corbusier and Group Theory. His acting credits in NYC include BOOZY (The Ohio Theater, The Culture Project @ 45 Bleecker), Heddatron (HERE Arts Center), Hell House (St. Ann’s Warehouse), and Bartleby: A Rereading (IRT Theatre). Daniel’s directing credits include Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (at Yale University), and Lysistrata by Aristophanes, Dance Nation by Clare Barron, and Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (at Saint Mary’s College). In January 2023 Daniel directed his original script Earthchild and the Waking Up: An Eco-Drama for Young Audiences at Saint Mary’s College’s LeFevre Theatre; the production played for visiting school children from across the East Bay.
Daniel’s core actor training has its roots in the American Stanislavsky tradition, but he has also explored Roy Hart vocal technique, work on song and action at the Workcenter of Grotowski, and integral movement and performance practice (informed by Jungian psychology) at the Thomas Prattki Centre, Berlin. Daniel is a trained facilitator in Joanna Macy’s “The Work That Reconnects” and has completed One Earth Sangha’s EcoSattva Training, a course in Buddhist practice and eco-psychology.
Daniel is a lead coordinator for Extinction Rebellion SF Bay’s Street Theater Group and an ongoing participant in Climate Change Theatre Action, a global series of performances about the climate crisis aimed at raising awareness and bringing communities together to take action. Daniel’s present creative activity centers upon projects that contribute artistic, symbolic, and emotional communication to the climate conversation. His underlying conviction is that our best chance for personal and collective transformation comes when we allow the ecological crisis to become a matter of the heart and of the soul.