Composer IN RESIDENCE
February 22 – March 8, 2023
Daniel Henri Emond
Daniel Emond is a Queens-based singer and composer for Musical Theatre who prefers to write his bio in 1st person. My Rock Musical KILL THE WHALE: A MUSICAL ODYSSEY––An irreverent re-telling of Moby-Dick, has seen development in Polyphone Festival, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Corkscrew Festival, NYU, the Melville bi-Centennial Conference, and Nantucket Theatre Workshop. I’m a 2021 Jonathan Larson Finalist and was a William R. Kenan Jr. Performing Arts Fellow and an NFAA Youngarts alum. Other composing credits include the multi-lingual score to the International Production of Neil Bartlett’s The Plague at Hong Kong Arts Festival 2021, and DAWN, a new Folk Musical, at Signature Theatre. I am currently workshopping a dream musical about Freud as an artist-in-Residence at Culture Lab at the Plaxall Gallery. I sometimes tour as a banjoist, and I write down every dream I can remember. I’ve worked or performed with Sam Bush, Ingrid Michaelson, Dave Malloy, Nathaniel Philbrick, Grace McLean, Larry Cordle, and others.
Artist Statement
I believe that artists are made of stranger stuff than humans who live and work in more “logical” fields. Where these more passionate energies come from I couldn’t guess. My life’s work is allowing my creativity to guide my journey through itself. I wake up each morning and find my way to the piano to sing and play in the hope that the divine will emerge, and when it does, it either finds its place right away in one of my musicals or onto the shelf until such a time when a work of art finally calls it home.
Key to my practice is the multi-disciplinary nature of performance. I write musicals, which consist of the efforts of many collaborations across numerous fields. I see the value in and the connective tissue between all mediums, and that they’re each, at heart, vehicles for the transmission of drama.
Community Engagement
