Welcome to Dan Friedman NYC

Welcome to Dan Friedman NYC.

There are a lot of Dan Friedmans. If you google “Dan Friedman” you get 12,200,000 results. If you add New York City after the name you narrow it down to 1,340,000. So let me clue you in on which Dan Friedman I am.

I’m the Dan Friedman on the faculty of the East Side Institute, an international research and training center for social therapeutics and performance activism. At the Institute, I research and write about political theatre, performance activism and cultural politics. I teach classes, organize webinars, and help to lead workshops. I’m the managing producer of the Institute’s podcast, “All Power to the Developing.” I serve as project manager for Let's Learn! a global community-engaged educational project of Lloyd International Honors College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in collaboration with the East Side Institute. I’m also deeply involved in the organizing Performing the World (PTW), a conference, sponsored by the Institute, which brings together performance activists, play revolutionaries and developmentalists from all over the world.

I’m also the Dan Friedman who is the Artistic Director Emeritus of the Castillo Theatre, a community-based, experimental political theatre, which I helped to found in 1984. I’m the Dan Friedman who in 2003 launched Youth Onstage!, Castillo’s free after-school youth theatre program. I’m the Dan Friedman who in 2010, working closely with Dr. Lenora Fulani and many others, helped launch UX, a free community-based school of continuing development for people of all ages, whose student body was drawn primarily from New York City’s working-class communities of color. Castillo, Youth Onstage! and UX are all part of the All Stars Project, Inc. (ASP), a non-profit active in five U.S. cities with affiliates outside the U.S. in London, Tokyo, Lagos and rural areas in the Mukono District of Uganda. The mission of the ASP is to engage poverty and transform the lives of youth and poor communities using the transformative power of performance.

The East Side Institute and the All Stars Project are both independently funded. They raise their money from individuals and don’t rely on government, foundation or university money—and they’re volunteer-driven—all of which has allowed them to remain flexible, innovative and independent, politically and creatively.

I’m the Dan Friedman with a doctorate in theatre history from the University of Wisconsin who has been a progressive political and cultural organizer since the late 1960s. I have edited a number of books on political theatre and am the author of Performance Activism: Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers (Palgrave, 2021). When invited, I also teach courses at universities and give talks at conferences around the world.

If that’s the Dan Friedman you’re looking for—or if any of that intrigues you—please read on.

For most of my life I’ve written plays and poems, and for the last 30 years or so, articles and talks on cultural politics, the Castillo Theatre, theatre history and performance activism. This site is meant, primarily, as a means of gathering my writings in one place and making them accessible to anyone interested in reading, studying, citing or, in the case of the play scripts, producing, them. www.danfriedmannyc.org is an archive of this Dan Friedman’s writings.