Daniel Brunet

Daniel Brunet is a director, performer, producer and translator. He was born in Syracuse, New York in 1979 and received a BA in theater arts and film studies from Boston College. He moved to Berlin in 2001 with the support of a Fulbright Scholarship. Brunet became Producing Artistic Director of English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center in 2012 and established an artistic concept there that mirrors his own work: English as a working language, used by non-native speakers and native speakers alike in bilingual or multilingual works exploring sociopolitical topics.

His best known productions include the verbatim theater piece Echter Berliner !!!! Ihr Nicht Fuck You, exploring the differences between so-called “expatriates” and so-called “immigrants”, the bilingual concept store performance Knick-Knack to the Future | Ruckzuck in die Zukunft, created together with the artist collective copy & waste and invited to the steirischer herbst festival, the verbatim theater piece The Land of Milk(y) and Honey: Israelis in Berlin in co-production with the ID Festival – Festival for Israeli-German Art and Culture, Islands, created together with Post Theater and the verbatim theater piece I Love EU?. He has also developed and world premiered new plays by Alexander Thomas, Amy Evans and Andrea Stolowitz.

Brunet has received multiple awards for his over thirty play translations, including the Literary Fellowship in Translation from the U.S. National Endowment of the Arts. His translation of Wolfram Lotz’s The Ridiculous Darkness was published by Oberon Books in 2019.

Together with the playwright and theater maker Sibyl Kempson, he received an Ibsen Scope Grant for the project A Bee in the Heart of Her from the Ibsen Scope Festival in Norway.

As an actor, he was given an honorable mention for most convincing portrayal of a fictional character by the jury of the 2024 Kurzfilmsause Freiburg Festival for his lead role in the short film Quintessential Boredom, which also won the audience award for best feature film.

Brunet was a guest director and instructor for German drama at the New School University in New York City in 2017. He is currently a lead lecturer in acting at BIMM University Berlin.

Brunet has served as the speaker for the performing arts within the Speakers’ Circle of the Coalition of the Independent Arts and as a co-opted board member of LAFT – Landesverband freie darstellende Künste Berlin e.V. since the end of 2018.