Daniel Phoenix Singh is a dancer, choreographer, and arts leader whose work spans performance, cultural strategy, higher education, and public arts leadership.
Daniel currently serves as the Executive and Artistic Program Director at Kalanidhi Dance
Daniel began his journey in Bharata Natyam with Guru Meena Telikicherla of Nrityanjali. In his modern dance practice, Daniel was mentored by Pamela Mathews as curiosity took him from computer science to a dance major in college. He is deeply grateful to Lorry May, Harriet Moncure Williams, and Karen Bernstein for helping shape his choreographic voice. Mallika Sarabhai, Madhavi Mudgal and Leela Samson in India have broadened his perspectives on the space Indian dance forms can occupy within the body, in the pedagogy, and in the field of dance.
He acknowledges the complicity and internalization of colonial, racial, and caste-based oppressions in his life and works hard to approach issues from an anti-caste, anti-colonial, and anti-racist perspective in all his work, especially dance. He has been influenced by the work of Erode Venkatappa Ramasamy (aka Periyar), Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore, Arundhathi Roy, Toni Morrison, Nrithya Pillai, Pallabi Chakravorty, Vidhya Shanker, and particularly Justin Laing who work from anti oppression frameworks. He is a single parent to amazing twins who have been his foremost teachers and test his improvisational skills every day.
His public educational background includes an MBA from Georgetown University, an MFA in Dance and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies/Critical Race Studies from the University of Maryland, a Laban Movement Analyst Certificate from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, and undergraduate study in dance at UMBC.