Playwright · Storyteller
Exploring identity, memory, and the ways personal narratives shape how we understand the world.
Currently developing Atlas Dreaming, a new stage play exploring identity, belonging, and spiritual inheritance.
About Daniel
Daniel Flores is a playwright and storyteller whose work explores identity, memory, and transformation through narrative and visual storytelling.
He is currently completing a Master of Communication Management at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Daniel received his BA in Communications from Valley City State University in 2024.
Part of Daniel's early artistic development began during his time living at Covenant House California, where he participated in the Digital Dove program and first worked as a production assistant. During this time he attended an intimate stage performance through the Los Angeles LGBT Center that profoundly inspired him. That night he returned to his room and began writing by moonlight while listening to music — the first time he attempted to write for the stage.
Years later Daniel returned to filmmaking and created the short film Viva Diva (2017), which he wrote, directed, and produced during his participation in the Sundance Native Lab. The film later aired on FNX as part of the Native Shorts program. He has also contributed to communication and marketing projects, including digital storytelling initiatives and the Yaqui Language Learning video series created with cultural advisor César Barreras.
He is currently developing Atlas Dreaming, a stage play exploring identity, spirituality, and belonging through visually driven theatrical storytelling. With Atlas Dreaming, Daniel returns to the theatrical form he first explored after seeing his first live play.
Stage & Screen Work
Stage Play · 2024–Present
A three-act stage play exploring memory, identity, spirituality, and transformation through a visually driven theatrical form.
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Visual Design · World Building
Visual concept designs exploring theatrical staging, lighting, and spatial storytelling for Atlas Dreaming.
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Short Film · 2017
Written, directed, and produced by Daniel Flores. Developed through the Sundance Native Lab and featured on FNX's Native Shorts program.
View Project →Featured Project
A new stage play in development.
Atlas Dreaming is a visually driven stage play that weaves together personal history, spiritual inquiry, and questions of belonging. Told across three acts, the play follows a figure navigating the spaces between memory and myth, ancestry and imagination.
The work draws on a layered theatrical language — blending movement, light, and design to create immersive worlds that exist at the intersection of the intimate and the epic. It asks: how do we carry the places and people that made us? And what does it mean to dream beyond the borders of who we were told to be?
Stage design concepts for the production explore how physical space can mirror interior states — using light, shadow, and architectural form as narrative tools in their own right.
Playwright Statement
Atlas Dreaming began as a story about identity, memory, and the ways we carry the past into the present. But as I began writing it, I realized the story needed to live on stage. The world of the play moves between intimate human spaces — hospital corridors, kitchens, night shifts — and the Flower World, a mythic landscape inspired by Yaqui cosmology where memory, spirit, and the living world intersect. Experiencing that transformation live felt essential.
Theatre allows the story to breathe differently. Each performance becomes a new encounter between actors and audience, where memory, grief, and identity unfold in real time. That sense of immediacy — the possibility that the story can live again and again with different audiences — felt central to the play.
What drew me most strongly to writing Atlas Dreaming for the stage was the collaborative nature of theatre. Unlike film, which captures a single moment, theatre is an ongoing conversation between performers, directors, designers, and the audience. That living collaboration felt like the right home for a story about becoming whole in front of others.
— Daniel Flores, Playwright
Story Synopsis
Atlas Dreaming unfolds across three acts, moving between the living world and the mythic Flower World.
Atlas Dreaming opens in New York with Sylvia, a pregnant immigrant reflecting on her Yaqui upbringing and the belief that time only moves when one is truly living. When she is suddenly rushed through hospital doors that never reopen, the story shifts years into the future.
Her child Atlas now works the night shift in an emergency room, navigating grief, distance from family, and a divided life between caregiving and performing at a nightclub as Stephanie — a dancer who feels alive under the stage lights. As Atlas forms a fragile connection with Chase, a vulnerable young man seeking care, questions of love, identity, and survival begin to surface.
When the nightclub manager Roger offers security at the cost of autonomy, Atlas is forced to confront the forces shaping their life — memory, desire, and ancestral presence. Act I ends with Atlas suspended between love and self-definition, caught at the moment where time seems to pause before a choice.
Act II traces Atlas's confrontation with conditional love and control. After a ritual glimpse of the Flower World, Atlas is formally shunned by extended family, severing ties to both kinship and memory.
Atlas's relationship with Chase deepens through care and projection, while Roger's influence tightens around work, housing, and intimacy. As these pressures converge, Atlas's private vulnerability turns inward, becoming intrusive thoughts and isolation.
Intercut scenes braid Roger's control with Chase's unraveling until Atlas flees to the rooftop, where the world fractures and a shattered snow globe opens the passage into the Flower World.
Act III unfolds in the Flower World — a quiet desert landscape where memory, spirit, and the living world meet. There Atlas encounters Sylvia, not as comfort or rescue, but as presence.
In this liminal space Atlas arrives at the central reckoning of the play: life cannot be lived in fragments or in pursuit of someone who is gone. Instead, Atlas begins to understand that grief and identity must be carried forward together.
Returning to the world of the living, Atlas confronts the possibility of living fully while carrying grief, memory, and identity — not in fragments, but as a whole person.
Key Characters
Atlas
A hospital worker navigating grief, identity, and belonging while searching for a way to live fully as themselves.
Chase
A vulnerable young man whose instability and longing create both connection and tension in Atlas's life.
Roger
A nightclub manager who offers security and opportunity while quietly tightening control.
Sylvia
Atlas's mother, whose presence bridges memory, ancestry, and the spiritual world.
Development Materials
A full script is available upon request. For inquiries, please use the contact form below.
Short Film
2017 · Written, Directed & Produced by Daniel Flores
Viva Diva follows Rozene (Lilly Warhammer) and Diva (Mya Taylor) as they make their way down to Guadalajara for their gender affirmation surgeries. Rozene stops in on her father (Joseph Runningfox) to try to get answers about their fractured relationship, but drama stands in the way of her getting the closure she seeks.
Credits
Writer / Director / Producer — Daniel Flores
Recognition
Selected Work
Storytelling · Accessibility Communication · Audience-Centered Narrative
About This Work
Daniel Flores approaches communication as a form of storytelling, using narrative, lived experience, and research to engage audiences across platforms. His work explores identity, accessibility, and community-centered communication, translating complex ideas into clear and meaningful experiences.
Based in the United States and open to remote opportunities.
Daniel develops narrative-driven social media content for Caption Consulting, translating accessibility issues and Deaf culture into engaging stories that connect with audiences and reinforce inclusive communication.
Content contributed to ongoing audience engagement and accessibility awareness across Caption Consulting's social platforms, supporting consistent brand presence and mission-aligned community outreach.
Thanksgiving graphic — Canva design for Caption Consulting
LinkedIn — Deaf culture and sports history post, Nov 2025
LinkedIn — Accessibility advocacy post, Mar 2026
A narrative-driven presentation exploring critical race theory through personal experience and research. The project weaves together lived experience — including time at Covenant House — with key frameworks such as intersectionality to examine how identity shapes access, belonging, and perception.
The presentation reflects Daniel's approach to communication as storytelling — connecting academic ideas to real-world experience in a way that is accessible, reflective, and grounded in voice.
Get in Touch
Whether you're interested in theatrical collaboration, strategic communication, or simply want to connect — Daniel would love to hear from you.
For inquiries about development opportunities, staged readings, or collaboration related to Atlas Dreaming, Daniel would be glad to connect.
