Bio

La DANIELLA (she/her) is an AfroDominican/Nuyorican actor/performer, playwright and puppeteer from Bushwick, Brooklyn, where her family has lived for 60 years, making satirical fabulist theater that centers queer Black/Latine women and working class communities.

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. As a playwright, her work has been supported by The Public Theater, 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) won the 2020 Burman New Play Award and was a finalist for the 2022 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. 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 acts as a story consultant on the upcoming one-man show, The Illio Snow Story (written and performed by rapper Civil). 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 as Gooey Pudín and Scabby da Rat, while she works retail on the weekends and teaches playwriting at the Harbor School with Big Green Theater/ SuperHero Clubhouse. She is a graduate of Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program and NYU Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Drama.