Danny Hoch

Danny Hoch, born in New York City, is an actor, playwright, and director known for his solo performances combining theater, hip-hop, and unequivocal social commentary.  Mr. Hoch attended New York University and the British American Drama Academy before joining the faculty of New York University’s Creative Arts team in 1990.  He has won many awards for his plays, among them two OBIES for Some People and Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop. Mr. Hoch is also the recipient of numerous fellowships, including a Solo Theater Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Sundance Institute Writers Fellowship, a Tennessee Williams Playwright’s Fellowship, and a Senior Fellowship from the Vera List Center for Art & Politics at The New School.

He is the founder of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, which has premiered over one hundred hip-hop theater performances in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and San Francisco.  His plays have toured to over fifty cities in the United States and to more than fifteen countries.  In his earlier career, among other projects, Mr. Hoch established theater workshops on AIDS, violence, and substance abuse for adolescents and co-wrote Children of War, a play based on youth healing from violence in Cambodia, Bosnia, Tibet, and the urban United States.

Mr. Hoch has written numerous articles on race, class, hip-hop, and theater for the New York Times, Village Voice, American Theatre Magazine, Harper’s, and New Theatre Review. He has also acted in or written for many television and movie productions, including Bamboozled, Washington Heights, Some People, Subway Stories, Thin Red Line, Blackhawk Down, HBO’s Def Poetry, and a film version of Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop. He recently appeared alongside Joaquin Phoenix, Robert Dvall, and Eva Mendes in the film  We Own the Night.

Mr. Hoch was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to develop A Word Is Born, a musical theater piece on the roots of hip-hop music and culture.