For the past ten years, Cuban-American composer Daniel José Older has been combining his passion for social justice work and his gift for music and storytelling to create emotionally moving and artistically cutting-edge multimedia performance projects. Daniel’s music combines soulful melodies with haunting accompaniment and driving beats, often using the clanks and whirrs of machinery and sounds of the city to enhance the rhythm.Daniel has collaborated with numerous choreographers (including The Urban Bush Women and Inspirit Dance Company), filmmakers (most recently scoring an animated short titled Moonfishing, produced by Cheryl Henson) and puppeteers. Additionally, he’s serving as producer/composer for spoken-work artist Malachi Rivers’ breakout hip-hop project, The Communication Specialist.As the lead coordinator of Reflect Connect Move, Daniel helped transform a loose network of direct service providers and community-members into a highly respected, city-wide organizing team that has united artists, activists and young people in bringing an anti-racist lens to the struggle for gender equality. His ability to analyze and mediate complex interpersonal and institutional power dynamics has earned him admiration throughout New York as a skilled consultant and workshop facilitator. Most recently, he participated in bringing together over six hundred audience members for a screening and panel discussion around the award-winning documentary Beyond Beats and Rhymes, which looks at images of manhood in Hip Hop.