La DANIELLA‍ ‍(she/her) is an AfroDominican/Nuyorican actor/performer/playwright from Bushwick, Brooklyn, where her family has lived for 60 years.

As an actress of film, television and theater, she is best known for her role as Zirconia on Netflix’sOrange is the New Black, for which she shares a nomination for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series by the Screen Actors Guild Awards. She is perhaps lesser known for her turn as The Virgin Mary in her Pre-K class’s Nativity Scene, even though it was from that moment on that she (and everyone else) knew she was destined for stardom. This year, she featured in the critically acclaimed 21st Century Princess by Jordan Baum at The Collapsable Hole after starring in a sold-out run of the original puppet musical Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure at the Bushwick Starr (which she also conceived and wrote the libretto for).

La Daniella began playwriting as a child, making melodramatic puppet theater with 30+ Barbie dolls and a single Ken doll (who was primarily used for breeding.) Since then, her playwriting has been supported by Lincoln Center, The Public Theater, The Bushwick Starr, ¡OYE! Group, Atlantic Theater Company, New York Theater Workshop, The New Group, Checkmark Productions, New York State Council on the Arts, The Puffin Foundation, Puppeteers of America, A.R.T./New York, The Anna Sosenko Assist Trust, Materials for the Arts, Hubbard Hall, Bethany Arts Center, Peabody Essex Museum and San Diego Repertory Theater. Her play Get Your Pink Hands Off Me Sucka and Give Me Back (FKA Columbus Play), a dark comedic ahistorical fabulation exploring the power of storytelling and the malleability of truth/the manipulation of fact within the context of the colonization of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, won the 2020 Burman New Play Award and was a finalist for the 2022 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her other plays include Malcriada, a three-act family drama exploring gendered roles and caretaking within a multi-generational, mixed race, working class Puerto Rican/Dominican family; and Sunday in TVLand, a satire with puppetry in which the star of a late 90s sitcom is replaced with a puppet made in her likeness, examining the psychological impact of growing up as a child actor.

She's an alum of The Public Theater’s 2018-19 Emerging Writers Group and a teaching artist with Future River’s Eco-Playwriting program at the Harbor School on Governor’s Island. She’s performed her writing at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Brooklyn Poets Yawp, and the United Solo Festival. Her poetry and creative writing has been published in Outlier Magazine, Young, Colored & Angry, Chiflada Magazine, Vagabond City Literary Journaland featured in the film Love Beats Rhymes (2017, directed by RZA).

Lately, La Daniella has been experimenting with puppetry and burlesque at Hand in the Hole, Puppets Come Home, Queers ‘n Peers Variety Show and We Wiggle Dolls. She is a graduate of Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program and NYU Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Dramaaaaa.