Artist Bio

Dan is a queer, working-class dance artist, theatre maker and practitioner from Blackburn, West Lothian, now living in Glasgow.

His practice is based in dance and theatre making, utilising persona and popular iconography to contextualise meaning and mediate his own autobiography, opening up the micro to relate to the macro. Dan has worked on a range of projects in dance and theatre with companies such as 21Common, The National Theatre of Scotland and Imaginate. He consistently challenges the expected ways of seeing a socially engaged practice, interrogating and subverting accepted outcomes. He co-creates processes and performances for non-performers to become autonomous makers and thinkers, to step into their agency by owning their autobiography. Dan is inspired by collaborating with young people, they are unapologetic, rich learners and always changing. Within this context, his practice seeks to dismantle what 'work for young audiences' means when their world is more complex than ever before.

Dan graduated from the BA (HONS) Contemporary Performance Practice course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2020. Since then, in addition to his own projects, Dan developed his practice through collaborating with other companies – most regularly with 21Common and The National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) who he has been working with since 2020. During this time Dan has made a film with learning disabled adults, worked as Lead Artist on 21Common's Disruptive Pedagogy with St Albert's Primary School, and acted as Video Designer and a Performer in 'Thank U, Next', part of the NTS 2025 season, touring across schools in Scotland. In 2023, he was awarded the Launchpad Bursary from Imaginate, their flagship award for the development of children's theatre.