Dan Wolf (he/him) is an artist who works with rap, theater, personal narrative, and history to give voice to the broken world we live in. His performances combine conventional theater techniques with the music, language, and aesthetics of the hip-hop generation. His multi-sensory work draws its power from years of experience writing, teaching, and performing with Felonious, a critically acclaimed hip-hop music and theatre company, and Sound in the Silence, a site specific historical education performance project. His work has traveled all around the world from theaters and concert halls to museums, schools, and memorial sites where he engages history as a prompt to make vital music and theater that can only live in this moment. He is the 2025 recipient of the Launch Award from the Playwrights Foundation for “changing the future through his internationally recognized historical remembrance work with young artists.”
His play “Stateless”, a hip-hop and beatbox infused theatrical collaboration with Grammy award winner Tommy Shepherd, balancing German and Jewish history with the problems of racism and the African American experience, has been produced in San Francisco, Hamburg and New York. His play “Angry Black White Boy”, based on the novel by Adam Mansbach, premiered at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco and was named Top Ten Best Theater Plays by the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner. His play “Beatbox: A Raparetta” (co-authored with Tommy Shepherd) has been produced in San Francisco, Oakland, Petaluma, Germany, and at the New York Hip Hop Theater Festival. “Beatbox” is published by TCG in the Hip Hop Theater anthology “Plays from the BoomBox Galaxy”.
Dan is currently developing Hip Hop Theater piece “The Bag” with Felonious. This project is supported by Aurora Theater Company's Originate+Generate program, and grants from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation's New and Experimental Works Program and the Gerbode Foundation's 2025 Theater Production Award.
Studio work with Felonious includes the albums Fight For Light, The List, Bust-a-Nursery Rhyme, Produce Section: Vol 1, Up To Something and Live City. Felonious has shared the stage with The Roots, De La Soul, Big Daddy Kane, DJ Premier, Black Eyed Peas, Zion I, and Living Legends.
He is the co-founder of the Bay Area Theatre Cypher, a collective of multi-hyphenate hip hop artists that live at the crossfader of theater and hip hop as a means to dismantle the traditional power structures found within the theater-making process by channeling the Hip Hop Cypher as a conduit for inclusive storytelling.
He is a board member of the Playwrights Foundation and a member of both the Recording Academy and Actors Equity Association.
He is a member of the 2025 Widen The Circle Fellowship and is a 2026 LABA Bay Area Fellow.
Dan’s projects and programs have been made possible with the generous support of the NEA, the European Union, New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), The Wood Foundation of Chambersburg, PA, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Gerbode Foundation Special Awards in the Arts, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Robert Sillins Family Foundation, Buenas Obras Foundation, Hamburg Culture Office, TBA’s CA$H Grant and the Performing Artists Assistance Program, Zellerbach Family Foundation, W.A. Gerbode Foundation, Individual Artist Grant and Organizational Project Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission, and individual donors.