Daniel is an assistant professor of Digital Media in Performance at The University of Iowa. He has a co-appointment in Dance and is a core faculty member of the Public Digital Arts Cluster. Daniel is an artist, scholar, and technologist working in immersive, responsive, mediated environments, site-specific locations and installations for interactive users, audiences and live performance. By combining the simple, traditional forms of storytelling with that of new media technologies and digital video, he produces, directs and designs large scale and intimate experiences in order to engage the imaginations and hearts of a twenty-first century audience.
Daniel holds a MFA in interdisciplinary digital media from the departments of Film, Dance and Theatre and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. For his thesis project, WONDER DOME, Daniel created a touring performance space where narrative is explored across the sciences and the arts in a 360-degree, immersive dome where narrative can be encountered, explored and told by mixing ancient forms of live performance with cinema, gaming, HCI and cutting edge digital technology. For this project ASU’s Center for Science and Imagination awarded Daniel a fellowship as a “creative disruptor driving path breaking research, teaching and outreach projects… exploding traditional disciplinary boundaries and bringing new audiences into the conversation about building a better future.”
Before coming to Iowa, Daniel was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Communication Arts at Benedictine University at Mesa for two years. He is currently publishing on HowlRound.com, writing a fifteen-part blog series about incorporating media design into live performance. In 2016 he wrote a book review for the journal TD&T (Theatre Design & Technology) for United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT). He has presented his work at professional conferences nationally and internationally and will teach workshops in projection at the 2016 LDInnovation Conference and the 2017 USITT Conference and Expo. Daniel is currently under contract for a new book, Projection Design and Technology for Theatrical Performance to be published by Focal Press, an imprint of Routledge.
In 2015 Daniel was one of “five visual visionaries” featured in Live Design magazine’s article on What’s Trending in Content Creation. His most recent large-scale architectural projection mapping and design work has been showcased internationally for MANTARAYA, in Puebla, Mexico at the 2014 Proyecta Festival and TERRA TRACTUS in an active rock quarry with Projects for a New Millennium in July 2014. Recent theatre credits: BENEATH, an interdisciplinary devised project between artists, computer scientists, seismologists and geologists which incorporated 3D projections at The Marston Theatre; a world premiere of EVERYBODY’S TALKIN: THE MUSIC OF HARRY NILSSON at San Diego REPertory Theatre; and the U.S. premiere of the Frank Wildhorn/Jack Murphy opera THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO at Brigham Young University.