Daniel Alexander Jones

Last updated

Daniel Alexander Jones (born 1970) is an American performance artist, playwright, director, essayist and educator.

Contents

Birth

Jones was born on February 9, 1970, to Georgina Leslie Jones and Arthur Leroy Jones at Wesson Women's Hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Education

He studied at Classical High School and became a member of the first graduating class of Springfield Central High School in 1987. Daniel attended Vassar College, graduating with a degree in Africana Studies in 1991. [1] He then pursued graduate study at Brown University, completing a master's degree in theatre in 1993. [2] At Brown he studied with both John Emigh and Aishah Rahman.

Career

Daniel Alexander Jones has created, to date, sixteen fully produced works of theatre and performance art, since beginning his professional career in 1994. His performance alter-ego, Jomama Jones, has been at the center of several of his works, including Black Light, a critically acclaimed performance piece commissioned by Joe's Pub's New York Voices program, that ran for six weeks in 2018 as part of The Public Theater's Astor Place 50th Anniversary Season, [3] Duat, produced by Soho Rep in 2016, [4] and Radiate, produced by Soho Rep in their 2010–2011 season. [5] Jomama Jones has released four albums, to date, including the most recent, Flowering, in 2017. [6] Jones's other plays and performance pieces include Phoenix Fabrik, Bel Canto, Bright Now Beyond, and An Integrator's Manual.

Jones built his early career in the Twin Cities, Austin, Boston, and New York City. Jones is a company member with Penumbra Theatre Company in St. Paul, MN; and an associate company member with Pillsbury House Theatre in Minneapolis. He was affiliated with the Theater Offensive in Boston and was a company member of Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre in Austin from 1995 until the company disbanded in 2001.

He is credited with making a significant contribution to the Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic, and was profiled alongside artists Laurie Carlos and Sharon Bridgforth in Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones's book, Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment [7] (Ohio State University Press).

In 2021, Jones launched Aten, the first in the ALTAREDSTATES series of multimedia digital performance pieces. The series was produced by CalArts Center for New Performance, commissioned by The Public Theater and New York Live Arts and is a New England Foundation for the Arts National Theatre Project Grantee. [8]

On October 12, 2021, Jones will release a collection of his work, a book entitled Love Like Light: Plays and Performance Texts. [9] The collection includes seven pieces and contributions from ten other artists.

Awards and honors

In the year 2000 Jones received the Creative Capital Performing Arts Award. [10] He was awarded the Alpert Award in the Arts in Theatre in 2006 in recognition of his work. [11] Jones was named a USA Artist Award recipient in 2016. [12] He received the Doris Duke Artist Award in 2015. [13] Jones was also a Mellon Foundation Creative Research Fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle, from 2017 to 2019. [14]

In 2019, Jones received the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, [15] and was awarded the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. [16] Jones is a 2020 TED Fellow, [17] and a 2021 PEN America/Laura Pels Theatre Awardee . [18]

Additionally, he was a 2020-2021 Artist in Residence at the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, [19] and is currently a Producing Artist at the CalArts Center for New Performance. [20]

Teaching

Jones was a Professor of Theatre at Fordham University on the Lincoln Center Campus from 2008-2022, attaining the rank of Tenured Full Professor. There he headed the undergraduate playwriting track, taught courses in playwriting, solo performance, theatre history, and, cross-listed with African American Studies, taught a course called Young, Gifted and Black which examined the lives and creative contributions of young artists in the Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Movement through to the current day. Jones previously taught at University of Texas at Austin, Goddard College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Related Research Articles

Lee Breuer American theatre director (1957–2021)

Esser Leopold Breuer was an American playwright, theater director, academic, educator, filmmaker, poet, and lyricist. Breuer taught and directed on six continents.

Bill Rauch American theatre director (born 1962)

Bill Rauch is an American theatre director. He was named the inaugural artistic director of the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center in 2016. Currently in development, the Perelman is the final piece of the plan to revitalize the World Trade Center site and will create work which inspires hope.

Soho Repertory Theatre

The Soho Repertory Theatre, known as Soho Rep, is an American Off-Broadway theater company based in New York City which is notable for producing avant-garde plays by contemporary writers. The company, described as a "cultural pillar", is currently located in a 65-seat theatre in the TriBeCa section of lower Manhattan. The company, and the projects it has produced, have won multiple prizes and earned critical acclaim, including numerous Obie Awards, Drama Desk Awards, Drama Critics' Circle Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize. A recent highlight was winning the Drama Desk Award for Sustained Achievement for "nearly four decades of artistic distinction, innovative production, and provocative play selection."

Tarell Alvin McCraney American actor and playwright

Tarell Alvin McCraney is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor. He is the chair of playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble.

Annie Baker American playwright and teacher

Annie Baker is an American playwright and teacher who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her play The Flick. Among her works are the Shirley, Vermont plays, which take place in the fictional town of Shirley: Circle Mirror Transformation, Body Awareness, and The Aliens. She was named a MacArthur Fellow for 2017.

Gideon Lester is a Tony Award-winning artistic director, dramaturg, curator, and creative producer. He is currently Artistic Director of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, Senior Curator of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts, and a professor at Bard. He has collaborated with a broad range of American and international artists including Romeo Castellucci, Justin Vivian Bond, Krystian Lupa, Peter Sellars, Tania El Khoury, Anna Deavere Smith, and Neil Gaiman. In 2015 he produced Daniel Fish's production of Oklahoma! at the Fisher Center; it subsequently transferred to St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn in 2018, and opened on Broadway at Circle in the Square in 2019, where it won a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. He frequently collaborates with the choreographer Pam Tanowitz, and commissioned her 2018 performance Four Quartets, based on T. S. Eliot's poems of the same name, with music by Kaija Saariaho, design based on the paintings of Brice Marden, and narration by Kathleen Chalfant. Four Quartets subsequently performed at the Barbican in London.

Sarah Benson

Sarah Benson is a British director of avant-garde theatre productions based in New York. As a Director of the Soho Rep, a lower Manhattan-based theatre company with an "audacious taste in plays", she is notable for her "commitment to adventurous new plays with an experimental bent". She has been at the company since 2007, and during her tenure, the company has won numerous Obie awards and Drama Desk nominations.

W. David Hancock American playwright

W. David Hancock is an American playwright, best known for his plays The Race of the Ark Tattoo and The Convention of Cartography. He is a two-time Obie winner for his works with the Foundry Theatre. His experimental, nonlinear work is known for blurring boundaries between artifice and reality, often through unconventional theatrical spaces and an object-centric dramaturgy. As the critic Elinor Fuchs writes, in Hancock’s work, “…we encounter mystery and authenticity at another level entirely.”

Melissa James Gibson is a Canadian-born playwright based in New York.

Ain Gordon is an American playwright, theatrical director and actor based in New York City. His work frequently deals with the interstices of history, focusing on people and events which are often overlooked or marginalized in "official" histories. His style combines elements of traditional playwrighting with aspects of performance art.

Sharon Bridgforth is an American writer working in theater.

The Doris Duke Artist Award is undertaken by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and designed to "empower, invest in and celebrate artists by offering multi-year, unrestricted funding as a response to financial and funding challenges both unique to the performing arts and to each grantee". Started in 2011, the program supports artists in jazz, theatre, and contemporary dance. The Doris Duke Artist Award offers up to $275,000 of individual support. Two classes of Doris Duke Impact Awards totaling $80,000 were made in 2014 and 2015, but the program was discontinued after that.

Caridad Svich is a playwright, songwriter/lyricist, translator, and editor who was born in the United States to Cuban-Argentine-Spanish-Croatian parents.

Oana Botez is a Romanian-American theatre, opera, dance and film designer, artist and activist. Botez currently resides in New York City and Bucharest.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins American playwright (born 1984)

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is an American playwright. He won the 2014 Obie Award for Best New American Play for his plays Appropriate and An Octoroon. His plays Gloria and Everybody were finalists for the 2016 and 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama respectively. He was named a MacArthur Fellow for 2016.

Virginia Grise is a playwright, and director. Grise's most recognized work is blu, the winner of the 2010 Yale Drama Series Award and a finalist for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts' Latino/a Playwrighting Award. In addition, Grise is the co-writer of The Panza Monologues with Irma Mayorga, and edited a volume of Zapatista communiqués called Conversations with Don Durito. She is also a recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award and the Princess Grace Award in Theater Directing.

Sarah Michelson is a British choreographer and dancer who lives and works in New York City, New York. Her work is characterized by demanding physicality and repetition, rigorous formal structures, and inventive lighting and sound design. She was one of two choreographers whose work was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, the first time dance was presented as part of the bi-annual exhibition. Her work has also been staged at The Walker Art Center, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, The Kitchen, and the White Oak Dance Project. She received New York Dance and Performance awards for Group Experience (2002), Shadowmann Parts One and Two (2003), and Dogs (2008). She has served as associate director of The Center for Movement Research and associate curator of dance at The Kitchen. Currently choreographer in residence at Bard's Fisher Center, she is the recipient of their four-year fellowship to develop a commissioned work with Bard students and professional dancers.

Lauren Yee is an American playwright.

Aleshea Harris American playwright

Aleshea Harris is an American playwright, spoken word artist, author, educator, actor, performer, and screenwriter. Her play Is God Is won the American Playwriting Foundation's Relentless Award in 2016.

C. Quintana is a Cuban-American playwright, poet, and writer. Her works have been published in literary journals and produced across the United States. The Heart Wants, her chapbook of poetry, was published in 2016 by Finishing Line Press.

References

  1. ↑ "Schedule Smashing History". Pages.vassar.edu. Archived from the original on December 15, 2012. Retrieved October 15, 2012.
  2. ↑ "Alumni | Theatre Arts and Performance Studies". Brown.edu. March 17, 2008. Archived from the original on January 12, 2013. Retrieved October 15, 2012.
  3. ↑ "Black Light". publictheater.org. Retrieved April 10, 2019.
  4. ↑ "Duat | Soho Rep" . Retrieved April 10, 2019.
  5. ↑ "Jomama Jones ★ Radiate | Show | Soho Rep" . Retrieved April 10, 2019.
  6. ↑ Flowering, January 2017, retrieved April 10, 2019
  7. ↑ Jones, Omi Osun Joni L. (2015). Theatrical jazz : performance, Àṣẹ, and the power of the present moment. The Ohio State University Press. ISBN   9780814273845. OCLC   908232581.
  8. ↑ "Aten – I choose to remember us whole" . Retrieved September 10, 2021.
  9. ↑ "Jones: Love Like Light - 53rd State Press". 53rdstatepress.org. Retrieved September 10, 2021.
  10. ↑ "Creative Capital". creative-capital.org. Archived from the original on December 21, 2009.
  11. ↑ "CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts". Alpertawards.org. Archived from the original on April 14, 2013. Retrieved October 15, 2012.
  12. ↑ "United States Artists " Daniel Alexander Jones" . Retrieved January 30, 2019.
  13. ↑ "2015 Doris Duke Artist Awards | Grant Recipients | Doris Duke Charitable Foundation". www.ddcf.org. Retrieved January 30, 2019.
  14. ↑ "Daniel Alexander Jones". Meany Center. May 12, 2017. Retrieved April 10, 2019.
  15. ↑ Clement, Olivia (June 19, 2019). "Michael R. Jackson, Aleshea Harris, and More Named 2019 Helen Merrill Award Winners". Playbill. Retrieved September 8, 2021.
  16. ↑ "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Daniel Alexander Jones" . Retrieved September 8, 2021.
  17. ↑ Jones, Daniel Alexander. "Daniel Alexander Jones | Speaker | TED". www.ted.com. Retrieved September 8, 2021.
  18. ↑ "Roster of Breakthrough Literary Visionaries to Receive 2021 PEN America Career Achievement Prizes". PEN America. March 23, 2021. Retrieved September 8, 2021.
  19. ↑ "L A Omnibus Constance Hockaday Daniel Alexander Jones Kristina Wong A Conversation About Art Activism and the Performance of Power". L A Omnibus Constance Hockaday Daniel Alexander Jones Kristina Wong At Online. Retrieved September 8, 2021.
  20. ↑ "CalArts Center for New Performance - » Residency: Daniel Alexander JonesCalArts Center for New Performance". CalArts Center for New Performance. Retrieved September 8, 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.