Daniel Bernard Roumain

About Daniel

Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) is a Black, Haitian-American composer who sees composing as collaboration with artists, organizations and communities within the farming and framing of ideas. He is a prolific and endlessly collaborative composer, performer, educator, and social entrepreneur whose work combines classical music with jazz, hip-hop and rock. “About as omnivorous as a contemporary artist gets” (New York Times), Roumain has worked with artists from J’Nai Bridges, Lady Gaga and Philip Glass to Bill T. Jones, Marin Alsop and Anna Deavere Smith. In September 2010, Dancers, Dreamers, and Presidents—an orchestral tone poem inspired by Ellen DeGeneres and then-senator Barack Obama—premiered at the New World Symphony. DBR composed the opera "We Shall Not Be Moved" in collaboration with librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph and director and choreographer Bill T. Jones. The opera premiered at Opera Philadelphia in September 2017.