Daniel Banks is an award-winning director, deviser, dance dramaturg, and community organizer. He is Co-Founder/Co-Curator of DNAWORKS, an arts and service organization dedicated to dialogue and healing through the arts. DNAWORKS centers Global Majority and LGBTQQ2SPIAA+ voices and experiences to create more complex representations of identity, culture, class, and heritage through theatre, dance, film, writing, and art installation. He is also Co-Convener/Board Co-Chair of Transform 1012 N. Main Street, a project to repurpose the former KKK Auditorium in Fort Worth, TX, into The Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing.
Banks has directed, led workshops, and/or instigated projects in 39 states and 23 countries; is Founder of the Hip Hop Theater Initiative; and has served on the faculties of NYU, CUNY, Carnegie Mellon, Naropa University, and as Chair of Performing Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is currently gathering his writings about Hip Hop Theatre into one affordable collection to ensure that the next generations of theatre artists – who seek to resist the same forms of oppression protested by the founders of Hip Hop in the 1970s through music, sound, poetry, dance, fashion, and visual arts – have access to Hip Hop Theatre’s narratives of innovation and liberation.
At MacDowell, Banks continued to research and develop new material for his collection of previously published essays on Hip Hop Theatre. He also worked on finalizing the dramaturgy and script for DNAWORKS’s dance-theatre adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, considered an early Queer text. The Secret Sharer is a recipient of the New England Foundation for the Arts National Theatre Project and will premiere at ArtsEmerson April 2026. Immediately prior to his residency, Daniel was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre.
