Artistic Director
Daniel has worked as a classical composer, having studied with Alan Belkin, an experienced improviser. He is a founding member of the Vertical Squirrels, an acclaimed quartet whose most recent recording with musique actualle label Ambiances Magnètiques Time of the Sign has been critically received as a ”masterpiece” (featuring Jane Bunnett, Ben Grossman, and Scott Merritt). He is Research Chair at the University of Guelph and a leading Canadian humanities researcher who has produced important cross-disciplinary work, including some sixteen books with a wide variety of international presses. His most recent books include (with Ajay Heble and George Lipsitz) The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (Duke UP) and a co-authored book with Martha Nandorfy entitled The Community of Rights • The Rights of Community (Oxford UP), the third in a trilogy of books co-written with Martha Nandorfy on rights issues. Daniel has received several major awards for teaching excellence and is to date the only winner from the Humanities of the prestigious Premier’s Research Excellence Award. He is a multiple award winner of SSHRCC grants as an independent researcher and as a core investigator on the MCRI and Partnership Fund grants and is associated with the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice (ICASP) project and the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI).
