La DANIELLA (she/her) is an AfroDominican/Nuyorican actor/performer/playwright from Bushwick, Brooklyn, where her family has lived for 60 years, making satirical fabulist theater that centers women & girls of color.

As an actress of film, television and theater, she is best known for her role as Zirconia on Netflix’s Orange 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 less known for her performance as The Skriker in Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker as directed by Riya Szelong-Lum at NYU Tisch: Playwrights Horizons, as athletic and captivating as it was. And perhaps even lesser known for her rendition of The Virgin Mary in her Pre-K class’s Nativity Scene at St. Elizabeth Seton’s Annual Christmas Show, even though it was from that moment on that she (and everyone else) knew she was destined for stardom.

La Daniella began playwriting as a child, making pseudo soap-operatic puppet theater with 30+ Barbie dolls in which they would all kiss and fight and make up and fall in love while the single Ken doll was kept for breeding. Since then, her playwriting has been supported by The Public Theater, The Bushwick Starr, New York Theater Workshop, The New Group, Checkmark Productions, United Solo Festival, Barrington Stage Company 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 Malrciada, 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, a staff writer on the upcoming narrative podcast FLIPPED! (produced by echoverse and Neal Baer) and a teaching artist with SuperHero Clubhouse: Big Green Theater. 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 Journal and 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. 

UPCOMING!
Join Gooey, a wise-cracking rat, an animated suitcase and
a radical socialist parakeet in Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure at The Bushwick Starr in February 2026. 

For the last 3 years, La Daniella has been developing Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure, a new puppet musical that follows Newtown Creek’s very own orphaned sorta mermaid: Gooey, who’s making the best of the sewage-filled swamp she calls home. Amidst the backdrop of a near apocalyptic Brooklyn bought by entertainment and tech giant G’wond’rLand Inc.,  Gooey spends each day escaping her putrid reality into a world of her own creation: a world in which she’s perfect, beautiful and loved. But when her radio sends her on a journey to G’wond’rLand Theme Park, Gooey comes face-to-face with a dozen eccentric characters including a streetwise rat, an animated suitcase, a radical socialist parakeet and a couple’a wiseguys who confront her with the truth about her dreams and how she came to be. Situated somewhere between The Little Mermaid, Frankenstein, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, and the tale of La Llorona, Gooey disgusts and delights in equal measure as it examines the difficulty of finding true belonging in a gentrifying New York City.

Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure

Concept, Book & Lyrics by La Daniella
Music, Arrangements & Additional Lyrics by Ben Langhorst
Directed by Sammy Zeisel
Puppets by Greg Corbino
Set Design by Cat Raynor
Costumes by Hahnji Hang
Line Produced by Leigh Honigman
Produced by The Bushwick Starr
in association with ¡OYE! group