Daniel Isengart

Resident Stage Director & Performance Coach

A trained dancer, entertainer, director, and performance coach who helps singers to analyze, shape and master the physical aspects of their on-stage expressivity.

Born in Germany and raised in France and Germany, Daniel moved to New York City to become an entertainer. A noted specialist in the Franco-German Chanson repertoire of the early 20th Century, he has brought his multi-lingual one-man shows to Joe's Pub at The Public Theater, the BAM Café at the Brooklyn Academy of Arts, Café Sabarsky at the Neue Galerie Museum, the Neuberger Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Berlin’s Spiegeltent Bar Jeder Vernunft, and SF MOMA. He has hosted and directed numerous cabaret-style variety shows at venues around New York City and beyond, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Gershwin Hotel, the Playboy Casino in Cancun, and the Night Hotel in Times Square, where his weekly, multinational Foreign Affairs cabaret ran for over a year. Working with conductor Edwin Outwater, he has been featured as a solo artist with the concert:nova ensemble, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, and the Sun Valley Music Festival. More recently, Daniel has staged operas with the KWS, directed the 2020 winter concert series at Sun Valley Music Festival, and taught a Masterclass on the art of the Master of Ceremonies at the En Piste Circus School in Montreal. He has taught a course on the history of vaudeville and the cabaret art form at NYU and given Masterclasses at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Bard College, and Wilfrid Laurier University. His ultimate aim is to vitalize the classic recital art form as he coaches singers and performers in stage craft, interpretative skills, body language and mime.

Daniel serves on the advisory board of the award-winning series Living the Classical Life, hosted by Zsolt Bognár.