Screenwriter, Graphic Novelist & Narrative Designer
Story drives our world – and I’ve spent my career exploring its power across evolving forms of media.
As a writer of screenplays and video games, narrative artist and producer of digital experiences and comics for companies like the BBC, Wired, AMC Television, Vanity Fair, NEXT Games, New York Magazine and SXSW Interactive, I’ve created crazy/innovative things like:
- An Instagram-native series revealing the techniques human traffickers use to recruit young people via the same platform they’re reading on
- A weekly horror comic serial combining the mortgage crisis, Afro-Cuban religion and psychedelics that ran simultaneously in English, Spanish and Portuguese
- An AR-enhanced comic series & street art campaign honored by UN Women starring an Indian teen heroine fighting violence against women
As a Story Consultant, I help companies improve their IPs by deepening world-building and tightening story structure, helping their characters resonate more with audiences. How can I help yours?
Awards
2018
• NEA Grant Recipient, Creativity Connects
2017
• FIVARS (Festival of Virtual & Augmented-Reality Stories), Impact Prize
• FilmGate Miami, Jury Prize
2016
• New York Film Festival, Convergence Official Selection
2015
• UN Women names PRIYA’S SHAKTI as “Gender Equality Champion”
2008
• Eisner Nomination for “Best Digital Comic”
2007
• UGO.com’s Underground Comic Artist of the Year
Biography
Raised in South Florida, Dan is a founding member of the ACT-I-VATE webcomics collective in Brooklyn, which launched the careers of many creators (including his own). In 2006, his serialized dystopian satire SHOOTING WAR was nominated for an Eisner Award.
Dan began contributing editorial illustrations regularly to New York Magazine‘s weekly “Intelligencer” column, eventually leaning harder into comics journalism with a long form collaboration with journalist Michael Crowley. Together they created 08: A GRAPHIC DIARY OF THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL, a 160-page nonfiction graphic novel documenting the chaotic 2008 Presidential election–written and drawn in real-time–which resulted in a hybrid of the visual languages of comics and magazine design that NPR Books called “defiantly and refreshingly unconventional.”
Post-election, Dan and his wife moved to São Paulo, Brazil where he began to produce his long-gestating passion project: a paranormal horror series called RED LIGHT PROPERTIES. Initially serialized online at Tor.com, the series saw print via IDW Books (US) and Plot! (Brazil) and is currently in-development as a live-action TV series.
Returning to NYC, Dan produced multiple seasons of Emmy-winning second-screen digital experiences for AMC Television including Breaking Bad, The Killing, and Halt & Catch Fire and scripted two video games based on mega-hit series The Walking Dead. He then co-created the augmented-reality enabled feminist comic series PRIYA’S SHAKTI. Funded by the Tribeca Film Institute, Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Dan criss-crossed the Indian subcontinent several times, working directly with the young people his stories were created to inspire. The series has since been downloaded nearly 1.5 million times in multiple languages worldwide. This experience in India inspired Dan to found the Kinjin Story Lab, a narrative studio dedicated to creating mindful entertainment across multiple media.
His most recent book CHASING ECHOES, a graphic novel about American descendants of Holocaust survivors traveling across rural Poland in search of family land seized by the Nazis, was released November 2019 from Humanoids Publishing.
Dan lives in New York City with his partner Liliam and their two spoiled cats.
Bibliography
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