Daniel Brunet

Daniel Brunet is an award-winning director, performer, producer and translator. Born in Syracuse, New York, he earned a BA in Theater Arts and Film Studies from Boston College before moving to Berlin in 2001 as a Fulbright Scholar. In 2012, he became Producing Artistic Director at the English Theatre Berlin, shaping its artistic vision to reflect his own: English as a working language, used by non-native speakers and native speakers alike in bilingual or multilingual works that explore sociopolitical themes.

Brunet's notable works include Echter Berliner !!!! Ihr Nicht F*ck You, a verbatim theater piece examining the distinction between “expatriates” and “immigrants”; Knick-Knack to the Future | Ruckzuck in die Zukunft, a bilingual concept store performance in collaboration with the artist collective Copy & Waste; and the  The Land of Milk(y) and Honey: Israelis in Berlin, co-produced with the ID Festival. He has also collaborated with Post Theater on Islands and created the verbatim theater piece I Love EU?. Additionally, he has developed and premiered new plays by Alexander Thomas, Amy Evans, and Andrea Stolowitz.

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 a translator, Brunet has received multiple accolades, including a Literary Fellowship in Translation from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts. His translation of Wolfram Lotz’s The Ridiculous Darkness was published by Oberon Books in 2019.

Brunet's work also extends beyond theater. At the 2024 Kurzfilmsause Freiburg Festival, he was given an honorable mention for most convincing portrayal of a fictional character by the jury  for his lead role in the short film Quintessential Boredom, which also won the audience award for best feature film.

Brunet has been a guest director and instructor for German drama at the New School University in New York City in 2017 and currently serves as a Lead Lecturer in Acting at BIMM University Berlin. He is also an advocate for independent arts, serving as 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.