Duke Alumna Danya Taymor Wins Tony Award for Direction

When the Tony Awards ceremony highlighted the year’s best work in the theater on Sunday, a Duke alumna walked away with one of the most prestigious awards.

Danya Taymor (T’ 10) won the award for Best Direction of a Musical, for her work on “The Outsiders.” The play, based on the classic novel by S.E. Hinton and the movie by Francis Ford Coppola, follows working-class teen Ponyboy and his friends in 1967 Tulsa as they struggle against an affluent rival gang.

It was the first nomination for Taymor. In winning the directing award, she is the sixth woman to hold the honor, joining her aunt, noted theater director Julie Taymor, who brought “The Lion King” to Broadway. 

Danya Taymor has worked in New York after graduating from Duke, directing in 2021 her first Broadway play, “Pass Over.” It was first play to open on Broadway after the pandemic.

Receiving the award, Taymor had a message for prospective theater artists. “To all the young artists out there who want to create – what some may perceive as a weakness or a liability in you might just be your superpower,” Taymor said. “Don't be afraid to trust your gut. Artistic risks yield rewards.”

At Duke, Taymor was an award-winning arts student, receiving the Jody McAuliffe Award for Excellence in Directing from the Department of Theater Studies and the university’s Louis Sudler Prize, given to a senior arts student with a distinguished record of excellence.

She also received a Benenson Award in 2010. She used it to travel with Theater Studies faculty member Jody McAuliffe to Toronto and Detroit to research and film aspects of Nigerian immigrant life for a  production of one of Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian author Wole Soyinka’s plays at Duke.

While at Duke, Taymor directed four full-length plays. In a recent interview, Taymor said her theater experience at Duke gave her access to talented faculty.

“I got to work with this amazing Spanish director, Rafael Lopez-Barrantes who, when I tried out for my first play, he cast me as the assistant director. And I was really confused, but I did it and then started directing at Duke,” Taymor told The Interval magazine in 2019.

“But the best part, for me, about being at Duke, where I did study theater but also studied public health, was making theater for people who don’t go to the theater and don’t even really care about the theater or have never been, and also making it with people like that.

“The best actors I had were all athletes and in sororities and going to do totally different things with their lives, but it was so worthwhile, especially the further I get from Duke, to try to work with people who aren’t trying to be actors, because it means you have to adjust to many, many different approaches, which I think as a director is a good skill to have.”

Two other Duke alumni also contributed to Tony Award-nominated plays:

Adam Beskind (T’ 20) is the music assistant and rehearsal pianist for “Water for Elephants,” which received seven nominations. Beskind is also serving as music assistant on the new musical “Death Becomes Her,”which is doing a Chicago run before a planned transfer to Broadway.

Duke alum Nathaniel Hill (T’ 12) was a member of the producing team behind Branden Jacob-Jenkins’s “Appropriate,” which won for Best Revival of a Play. Hill is also the co-founder & president of the Broadway Plus entity. (Read a Duke Arts interview with Hill about the post-pandemic return to Broadway.)