JD Daniel

PROPSLIST: connecting the queer world.
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Skill Sharing: JD Daniel

JD Daniel is a child classical pianist turned professional composer-producer and bass-baritone singer, writer, amateur pianist and piano arranger, and intersectional advocate. Influenced by electronica, video games, psychology, philosophy, and interdisciplinary collaboration and experimentation, JD’s work delves into the intersections of personal and political, secular and mystical, and theatrical and existential. As a queer Indian-American and atheist, JD is passionate about using his music and writing to speak from a broadly humanist perspective and give voice to queer, trans, BBIPOC, and other marginalized communities and narratives. He is known especially for his contemporary-classical and choral singing, writing and blogging on social justice and mental health, and compositional work with minimalism, poetry, and both sung and spoken word.

JD is particularly passionate about interrogating the dominant cultures and institutions within western-classical music, decolonizing its narratives and value-systems, and advocating for equity, representation, and ethical cultural cosmopolitanism. Their music often becomes an ethereal, existential escape from this dominance, filling the air with rich atmospheres, hypnotic repetition, and sonic poetry. But they also recognize the need to lean into the reality of dominance and oppression and speak to it, and at it, with radical acceptance and radical inclusivity. They continue to seek deeper connection with their ancestral musics of India and to find ways to broaden and diversify the conversation in North-American and global contemporary artistic practice.

JD holds a Bachelor of Arts in Oxbridge Music and Philosophy from William Jewell College (’19), and he is an Associate Alumnus of Regent’s Park College at the University of Oxford (visiting programme, ’18). This background in liberal arts and research greatly informs his work. As of 2020, JD’s advocacy, philosophical research, and aesthetic inquiry have covered areas such as ambient music, music ritualism, secularity in music, cultural appropriation in music, horizontal artistic relationships, atheistic existentialism, the problematics of faith, anarchafeminism, and the decriminalization of sex work.

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