Playwright and songwriter Dan Fishback is perhaps best known for a performance that never happened. In 2017, the American Jewish Historical Society abruptly canceled a staged reading of his musical Rubble Rubble, citing his advocacy for Palestinian human rights. While Rubble Rubble’s cancellation provoked controversy, it was only one moment of crisis in Fishback’s ongoing artistic inquiry into the forbidden shadows of Jewish and queer life in the United States.

Fishback began performing in NYC’s antifolk scene in 2003, releasing several albums, both solo and with his band Cheese On Bread, which dropped its most recent recording The One Who Wanted More in 2018, along with a video for their song “Bad Friend,” directed by legendary underground queer filmmaker Stephen Winter. As a playwright, Fishback is known for comedic political theater. The Material World, which found a family of Jewish socialist immigrants confronting the promise of Soviet utopianism in the 1920s, was called “quietly revolutionary” and “the best downtown musical in years” by Time Out New York in 2012, and his 2009 play You Will Experience Silence, which reframed the Chanukah story in the context of the Iraq War, was called “a forceful, often hilarious reflection on the politics of American occupation” by the Village Voice. Fishback’s 2011 solo performance thirtynothing confronted the then-under-discussed history of the early AIDS epidemic, and sought to understand the meaning of gay mass death for gay men who were children in those terrifying years.

In 2013, spurred by the political questions inherent in his thirtynothing project, Fishback founded The Helix Queer Performance Network–a programming platform designed to bring queer generations together and redress inequities in the world of queer arts and culture. He directed Helix’s slate of intergenerational festivals, workshops and public events through the platform’s conclusion in 2020, including La MaMa Experimental Theater’s annual festival La MaMa’s Squirts: Generations of Queer Performance, which continues today, now curated by Alexander Paris.

Fishback has myalgic encephalomyelitis–also known as chronic fatigue syndrome–and hosted the podcast Sick Day with Dan Fishback from 2018 through 2019. His exploration of disability inspired much of his new EP, Ill I - Laughing With Lizards, and his forthcoming theater event Dan Fishback is Alive, Unwell & Living in His Apartment.

Fishback partially supports himself through his Patreon.