TORONTO – Playwright, poet and essayist, Daniel David Moses, is the 2015 recipient of the Ontario Arts Council Aboriginal Arts Award Created in 2012. This award celebrates the work of Aboriginal artists and arts leaders who have made significant contributions to the arts in Ontario. The $10,000 prize will be presented at an event this summer.
Playwright, poet, and essayist Daniel David Moses is the 2015 recipient of the Ontario Arts Council Aboriginal Arts Award.
The Ontario Arts Council Aboriginal Arts Award also honours the next generation of artists: each year, the award recipient is invited to nominate an emerging Aboriginal artist to receive a $2,500 prize. Moses has selected actor, playwright and dramaturge Falen Johnson as this year’s emerging Aboriginal artist. Daniel David Moses hails from the Six Nations of the Grand River and lives in Kingston, Ontario. He has worked in the arts for more than three decades, first as a poet, and subsequently as a playwright, dramaturge, editor, essayist and artist-/playwright-/writer-in-residence.
In 2003, he joined the Department of Drama at Queen’s University as a Queen’s National Scholar. Daniel co-edited Oxford University Press’s, An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, a founding text for the study of Canadian Indigenous literature. The fourth and 20th anniversary edition appeared in 2013. His 13 produced and/or published plays include Coyote City, The Dreaming Beauty and Almighty Voice and His Wife – the only Canadian work featured in The Norton Anthology of Drama, Volume Two (Second Edition). His most recent poetry collections are River Range (a CD with original music by David Deleary) and A Small Essay on the Largeness of Light and Other Poems. Daniel has worked with organizations as varied as Theatre Passe Muraille, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the University of British Columbia, the Sage Hill Writing Experience (Saskatoon, SK), Concordia University, the National Arts Centre’s English Theatre and the Institute for American Indian Arts (Santa Fe, NM). He has also served on the boards of the Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts, Native Earth Performing Arts, and the Playwrights Guild of Canada.
He holds an Honours BA in General Fine Arts from York University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia.
“Daniel is very deserving of this prize,” noted the jury. “He is one of the key figures of Aboriginal theatre, both artistically and academically, and is developing an essential Indigenous archive. He is committed to telling the stories that created this country and is an advocate for Aboriginal culture.”
“We are delighted to recognize Daniel with this year’s Aboriginal Arts Award,” said Peter Caldwell, Director & CEO, Ontario Arts Council. “With his high standards and a long list of accomplishments, Daniel exemplifies the fine qualities that this award celebrates.”
