Daniel Passer directed Monkey King. He creates work as a performer, writer and director. For over a decade, Daniel has been a lead Clown and Comedy Conceptor for Cirque du Soleil and Dragone Entertainment. He was the comedy and clown act designer for Cirque’s critically acclaimed Zarkana and comic performer and creator for Franco Dragone’s spectacle Le Reve which continues to run in Las Vegas. Credits include plays on Broadway and across the globe at venues such as Radio City Music Hall, The Beacon Theater, The Goodman, The American Repertory Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Madrid Stadium, Moscow Art Theatre and The Kremlin. Most recently, he played Autolycus in Winter’s Tale in the Off Broadway Play On run at Classic Stage Company and created the clown material for the spectacle Menagie in Sonoma. He collaborated and performed in the opening ceremony installation for Burning Man with a world class ensemble of aerialists, acrobats and dancers. He has performed with the ensembles of The Actors’ Gang, Cornerstone Theatre, Lookingglass Theatre Company and is a founding member of the international clown companies Your New Best Friends, Gods of Sex and The Rotten Plantains. Daniel is co-founder of Darkstage Theatre Company, a company dedicated to touring the maximum-security prisons in California. Darkstage’s production of The Maids received the ArtsReach and William James Association Grants for its San Quentin Prison production.
Film acting credits include Boychoir directed by Francois Girard, Danny Roane – First Time Director, Music from Another Room, Almost Heroes, and Ted. On television, Daniel has appeared on Monk, King of Queens, Grounded for Life, Providence, Tracey Takes On, and News Radio. Writing, Directing and Producing credits include: the feature film Ted (winner Audience Choice Award at the San Francisco Film Festival and Best Comedy at the New York Independent Film Festival), the documentary television series Kiss ‘n Tell for WE, The Costello Show, The Emmy Awards and several music videos.
Daniel is on the faculty of the Theater School at CalArts and has taught Commedia/Clown/Improvisation at Moscow Art Theatre, Cirque du Soleil, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Brown University, Harvard, Cornell, CalArts, Trinity College, The Second City and was the Master Acting Teacher for The Edward Albee Theatre Festival and the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts. Daniel was the U.S. representative at the International Commedia dell’Arte Festival in Italy and a graduate of U.C. Berkeley and The A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard.
He is currently working on Clown Frankenstein with Cirque du Soleil Clown and Creator Claudio Carneiro and Way of Wolf an interdisciplinary performance project with performer and writer Marissa Chibas that has workshopped at LA’s Automata in January 2018 and Teatr Studio in Warsaw Poland as part of CalArts Center for New Performance Residency and Festival/Teatr Studio, Warsaw, 2018. For more, please visit danielpasser.com.
