California Institute of the Arts Center for New Performance announced Alpert Award-winning theater artist Daniel Alexander Jones has joined its leadership team as Producing Artist.

Jones is the 2021 PEN America/Laura Pels Foundation Awardee in Theatre. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, a Doris Duke Artist Award, and a USA Artists Fellowship. Jones is a Professor of Theatre at Fordham University.

The Producing Artist role is central to the Center’s artistic programming and reflects its mission to enfranchise, empower and follow the artist. In this role, Jones will be a crucial part of programming decisions as well as identifying artists to engage and develop through the residency program. In line with these objectives, he will be leading a new initiative dedicated to Afromysticism.

“Having admired and worked with Daniel for years, it became crucial to embrace his broad range of skills and impulses as part of our core leadership team,” said Executive Artistic Director and Dean, CalArts School of Theater, Travis Preston. “We are thrilled to work together with him to define the future of performance and to embrace Daniel’s concept of Afromysticism as a major focus of our producing activities.”

“I am thrilled to partner with the CalArts Center for New Performance at this particular time to help fellow artist-citizens cultivate bravery, compassion and wild creation through this generous, applied practice,” said Jones. “I use the term ‘Afromysticism’ to conjure the soulful dimensions. It describes art born from the long, radical and participatory tradition of visionary Black artists, committed in word and deed to liberation. They offered creative technology to get us all freer. Afromysticism radiates when we come together with generative connections between individuals and communities, between the subjective and the collective, among and across past, present and future possibilities. Freedom must be practiced.”

Jones’ appointment affirms the centrality of practicing artists to the leadership team and in defining the artistic mission and producing landscape of the Center. Joining a leadership team that includes Preston, Director of Duende CalArts/Producing Artist Marissa Chibás, Associate Artistic Directors Amanda Shank and Chi-wang Yang and Producing Director Rachel Scandling, Jones will be integral to a broad range of activities, including artist and project development, artist mentorship, programming decisions and design, as well as the general direction of the Center’s philosophy and mission.

For 20 years, the Center, the professional producing arm of CalArts, has been an active incubator of new directions in the performing arts. Through ongoing residencies, development support and presentations on the local, national, and international stage, the Center invests deeply in the creative practices of visionary national and international artists, realizing projects through a commitment to artist-led process.