Daniel Leeman Smith

Daniel Leeman Smith is a two-spirit citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma who currently serves as the Program Manager of NYU's Creative Career Hub in the heart of Lenapehoking. His work for NYU is focused on creating experiential learning opportunities that remove systemic barriers for underrepresented students and providing career services for students in the arts and entertainment sector.

Daniel is a multi-disciplinary theatre maker working primarily as a director and playwright. His work is positioned at the intersection of art, education, community, and activism. Recent theatre credits include Ajijaak on Turtle Island (National Tour), Where We Belong (The Public Theater/Woolly Mammoth), Flying Bird's Diary (at the Tony Award winning Long Wharf Theatre), Poyvfekcv and Built On Bones (New Native Play Festival at the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program), Perhaps the World Ends Here (Local Classic Repertory), and Repulsing the Monkey (White Horse Tavern). In 2014, he served as the Assistant Stage Manager and 2nd Unit Production Manager on the film Distant Vision, working directly under Academy Award winner Francis Ford Coppola.

He is a doctoral candidate in the program of Educational Theatre in Colleges and Communities at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, where his work is grounded in ethnodrama and focused on the impact of European Christian settler colonialism on two-spirit people and their Indigenous communities. Daniel has been an educator for over a decade, teaching 6th grade through graduate school, and has taught at the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh, and is currently an Adjunct Professor of Theatre Studies at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Marymount Manhattan College. Prior to joining NYU, he served as the District Chair of Speech, Theatre, Film, and Dance for the fifth largest public school district in the state of Oklahoma. 

Daniel is an Associate Member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, as well as a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. He is an alumnus of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, SDC Observership Program, and Lincoln Center Education’s Teaching Artist Development Lab. He earned his BFA and MA at Oklahoma City University and completed the graduate theatre conservatory program in physical and devised theatre at the SITI Company. Daniel is also the 2014 recipient of the New York City Pride Award.