Dan Fishback

Dan Fishback is a playwright and musician in NYC, with a two-decade body of work exploring the shadows of Jewish and queer life in the United States. After early years presenting music and performance art in small clubs, Fishback began staging full-length plays at Dixon Place in 2009 with “You Will Experience Silence,” which reframed the Chanukah story in the context of the Iraq War, and was called “a forceful, often hilarious reflection on the politics of American occupation” by the Village Voice. Fishback’s 2011 solo performance “thirtynothing” confronted the then-under-discussed history of the early AIDS epidemic, and sought to understand the meaning of gay mass death for gay men who were children in those terrifying years. In 2012, his first musical “The Material World,” which found a family of Jewish socialist immigrants confronting the promise of Soviet utopianism in the 1920s, was called “quietly revolutionary” and “the best downtown musical in years” by Time Out New York. The follow-up to “The Material World,” called “Rubble Rubble,” was scheduled for public presentation at The American Jewish Historical Society in 2017, but was canceled by that organization’s board after a right-wing smear campaign targeted Fishback for his Palestine solidarity activism. After a successful crowdfunding campaign, the reading was presented independently at New World Stages in 2018. All four aforementioned plays were directed by Stephen Brackett. As a musician, Fishback began performing in NYC’s antifolk scene in 2003, releasing several albums, both solo and with his band Cheese On Bread, which dropped their most recent recording “The One Who Wanted More” in 2018, along with a video for their song “Bad Friend,” directed by legendary filmmaker Stephen Winter. Fishback’s most recent solo recording, “Ill I – Laughing with Lizards,” was released in 2024, along with two music videos directed by Fishback, including a hand-animated short film for the subtitular track. In 2013, Fishback founded The Helix Queer Performance Network–an intergenerational programming platform designed to redress inequities in the world of queer arts and culture. He directed Helix’s slate of festivals, workshops and public events at La MaMa Experimental Theater, BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics through the platform’s conclusion in 2020. Helix’s flagship series, the annual festival “La MaMa’s Squirts: Generations of Queer Performance,” continues today. In recent years, as Fishback has struggled with myalgic encephalomyelitis (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome or ME/CFS), he has reoriented his artistic practice towards disability justice, with the rock musical “Dan Fishback is Alive, Unwell & Living in His Apartment,” which was commissioned by Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in 2024. In that same year, Fishback received the Vivace Award for musical theater from the Bret Adams & Paul Reisch Foundation. Fishback is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and sits on the Joe’s Pub Council.

Dan Fishback Headshot Credit: Sammy Tunis