Biography
Daniella De Jesús is a writer/performer/part-time siren from Bushwick, Brooklyn and a second-year playwright in the Juilliard School's Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program. Her plays include Get Your Pink Hands Off Me Sucka and Give Me Back (FKA Columbus Play) (2022 finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2021 winner of the Burman New Play Award), Mambo Sauce (The New Group Off Stage, semi-finalist for Clubbed Thumb’s 2018 commission), Pa’ Ti Tengo De Todo (The Public Theater’s Spotlight Series), Untitled Puppet Show, or On The Other Side of Anchovy Avenue (commissioned by The Public Theater for Play At Home), and her one-woman show The Thief Cometh (United SoloFestival). She's a member of The Public Theater’s 2018-19 Emerging Writers Group and, more recently, a staff writer on the inaugural season of the upcoming narrative podcast "FLIPPED!" (produced by Echoverse and Neal Baer). Her poetry appears in Young, Colored & Angry, Chiflada Magazine, Vagabond City Literature, and the film Love Beats Rhymes (directed by RZA). As a performer, she is best known for her role as Zirconia on Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, for which she received a nomination for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series by the Screen Actors Guild Awards. De Jesús is a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Drama.