Daniel Larlham is a theatre-maker and performance researcher with an MFA in Acting from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a PhD in Theatre from Columbia University. 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).
Daniel’s core actor training has its roots in the American Stanislavsky tradition, but he has also explored Roy Hart vocal technique, Michael Chekhov’s psycho-physical approach, 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, along with other methodologies. 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 the faculty project co-director of the Eco-Performance Lab at UC Berkeley, a TDPS-sponsored ensemble funded by The Green Initiative Fund. The Lab’s mission is to confront the ecological crisis with performances that are alive with expressivity and meaning and anchored in place and community. In 2025-26, the Eco-Performance Lab produced The End Times Trashion Show on the Savio Steps, Climate Change Theatre Action at the David Brower Center, and Earth Day on the Glade, an outdoor festival of performance on UC Berkeley’s central green space. Projects for 2026-27 include Anthroposcenes: An Evening of Climate Theatre at Shotgun Players, a dance project facilitated by TDPS faculty member Iu-Hui Chua, and The “Birds”: An Escapist Escapade with Misanthropic Tendencies! (an outdoor spectacle in the spirit of Aristophanic comedy).
Daniel’s directing credits include The Trials by Dawn King (UC Berkeley TDPS), Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (Yale University), and Lysistrata by Aristophanes, Dance Nation by Clare Barron, and Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Saint Mary’s College). 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 articles and reviews have appeared in TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, Theater (Yale/Duke U. Press), Modern Drama, and Theatre Survey, among other publications. His current research interests include performance and ecology, psycho-physical and transpersonal acting techniques, and drama and psychology. Daniel is a co-convener of the American Society for Theatre Research’s “Performing and Ecology” working group, and he recently co-edited an issue of Theater magazine (Yale/Duke U. Press) on emergent forms of climate theatre and eco-performance (forthcoming in February 2027).
Daniel’s underlying conviction is that our best chance for personal and collective transformation comes when we allow the ecological emergency to become a matter of the heart and of the soul.