Residency: Daniel Alexander Jones

2020-2021 CNP Resident Artist

Prolific performer and Alpert Award winner Daniel Alexander Jones is the 2020/21 CNP Resident Artist. Thought the year he will be engaging the CalArts community and developing exciting new works.

Daniel Alexander Jones exemplifies the artist as energy worker. Daniel’s wildflower body of original work includes plays, performance pieces, recorded music, concerts, music theatre events, essays, and long-form improvisations. Energy is his true medium. He creates multi-dimensional experiences where bodies, minds, emotions, voices, and spirits conjoin, shimmer, and heal. He aims to return us in full to ourselves and one another.

Jones’s numerous critically-acclaimed plays and performance pieces include Black Light (Public Theater, Greenwich House Theatre); Duat (Soho Rep); An Integrator’s Manual (La MaMa, etc. and Fusebox Festival); and Radiate (Soho Rep and National Tour). Jones has recorded five albums of original songs as his alter-ego, Jomama Jones. He is recognized as a key voice in the development of Theatrical Jazz and has made a significant contribution to Black Experimental Theatre and Performance. He is currently developing ☾Altar no. 5⚡︎, a commission of the Public Theater developed in partnership with New York Live Arts.

Jones creates his own distinctive dramaturgy. His roots reach deep into Black American and Queer Performance traditions, and his work explores ideas of the Afromystical (awakening awareness of the numinous in the everyday through ritualized performance). Over more than two decades of professional practice, Jones has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to civic healing through vulnerable presence, truth telling, and collective critical engagement.

Learn more about Jones’s work at danielalexanderjones.com