Dan Bernitt is an American playwright, educator, and performance artist. His solo performances, including Yelling at Bananas in Whole Foods and Phi Alpha Gamma, have been presented in theatre festivals and performance series throughout the United States and in Ireland. For the Gay Stage (McFarland, 2017), a comprehensive history of gay theatrical performance from Aristophanes to the present, positions his work as a bridge between solo performance pioneers and the multi-character work that followed. He is a recipient of the Robert Chesley Award for Lesbian and Gay Playwriting and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. His work is preoccupied with the gap between who we become and who we almost were, and what it costs to look that person in the eye.

LONGER BIOGRAPHY

Dan Bernitt has spent his career building rooms.

In the playwriting program at The New School for Drama, he noticed that search engines are where people type their desires. As a student assistant in the university’s marketing department, he restructured a digital campaign around that insight and watched conversions skyrocket. When he returned full-time in 2012, his continued optimizations quadrupled conversions while cutting conversion costs by 70%.

He founded Sawyer House Press to publish his own first collections, and in doing so published the debut poetry collections of writers who would later find homes at Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Northwestern University Press, and Penguin Random House. At Scribe Media, he applied the same instincts he’d developed at Sawyer House to a team of publishing managers guiding high-profile clients through the process of making books: finding people with something to say and helping them say it. But the theater never stopped. His solo performances Yelling at Bananas in Whole Foods and Phi Alpha Gamma traveled to festivals and performance series throughout the United States and in Ireland.

For the Gay Stage (McFarland, 2017), a comprehensive history of gay theatrical performance from Aristophanes to the present, positions his work as a bridge between solo performance pioneers and the multi-character work that followed. Wilde Stages in Dublin (2013) recognizes Phi Alpha Gamma as a “complex text” among the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival’s emerging international voices. He is also a recipient of the Robert Chesley Award for Lesbian and Gay Playwriting, and his books Dose: Plays & Monologues and Phi Alpha Gamma were finalists for the Lambda Literary Award. His writing has been supported by an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, artist development grants from Kentucky Performing Arts, and a residency from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico.

Every summer from 2013, he returned to the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts, teaching young writers to discover and nurture their voices. He became program chair in 2017.

At the end of 2019, he left full-time institutional work to make art and teach. Then the pandemic came.

When live performance disappeared, he built a theater anyway: he converted an apartment bedroom into a livestreaming performance space with stage lights, curtains, and multiple camera angles—and he kept making performances. The connection to Amherst College had been years in the making: a poet whose first collection he published had joined their faculty and brought him in to perform Phi Alpha Gamma as part of their visiting writers series. He performed from the bedroom studio. When a position unexpectedly opened months later, Amherst called. He flew up Labor Day weekend, met with the department chair on Monday, and was in the classroom Tuesday. That fall he taught two creative writing courses. In January, he developed a new course on liveness and livestreaming, built from the work they’d already watched him do.

He has taught creative writing at the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts, Amherst College, and Christian Brothers University, where he expanded the creative writing curriculum and advised the university’s art and literary magazine to a first-place finish at the Southern Literary Festival.

He lives in Memphis, where he is currently completing his debut film Evan, which documents the quiet collapse of a minor content creator.