Daniel Daly is a composer, doctoral candidate, and Graduate Teaching Fellow at the University of Oregon (UO). As both a musician and writer, Daniel regularly creates works that bring music and text together. In 2017, he composed The Banshee, a chamber opera that premiered at the Music Today Festival in Eugene. His standalone opera scenes My House Is Ancient (2016) and My Quiet One (2018) were performed by Grammy-winning soprano Estelí Gomez at the Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium. In 2020, Daniel was awarded UO’s prestigious Margaret McBride Lehrman Fellowship to create and produce a completely original, full-length opera as his dissertation.

Daniel also composes music for theater. His electronic score for Wajdi Mouwad’s play Scorched, produced at the University of Oregon’s Hope Theatre in 2016, received an award for meritorious achievement from the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. As both a composer and music director, Daniel instructed actors in the performance of his original song settings for Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (adapted by Tony Kushner), which was produced at UO in 2018. He also served as a Music Assistant at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he created music and sound design for a production of Caryl Churchill’s apocalyptic drama, Far Away.

In addition to his PhD in progress, Daniel holds two degrees: a Master of Music in Composition from UO (2017), and a Bachelor of Music from Willamette University (2012), where he graduated summa cum laude. He lives in Salem, Oregon, with his wife Danielle.