Danny Hoch (born 23 November 1970) is an American writer, director and performance artist. He has also acted a few small roles in mainstream Hollywood films as well as larger roles in independent and art house movies. He is best known for his one man shows, which he would like to be considered theatre rather than performance art.
Two of his three one-man-shows, Jails, Hospitals & Hip Hop and Some People, were published together in 1998. In both pieces he explores the multi-cultural (and multi-lingual) New York he grew up in, providing adept monologues in the languages of the people, Cuban Spanish, Bronx Dominican Spanish or Nuyorican, Jamaican Patois or Trinidadian English the differences are acute and not overblown in Hoch's portrayals, as he lets his characters showcase their varied lives theatrically — not just by doing different "voices."
A prevailing theme in Hoch's work, within its spectrum of unification and deep similarities under superficial differences, is the power of hip hop. Naive or street-wise white youth believing or dreaming that they are black, African-American kids dreaming of making it as a rapper, a Cuban street vendor's love of Snoop Dogg.
Some People followed his first endeavor, Pot Melting, and was broadcast on HBO in the mid-90's, which granted Hoch more national exposure, allowing him to tour more cities to greater crowds. Hoch founded the Hip-Hop Theater Festival in 2000. Together, his three plays have won many awards, including two Obie Awards, a Sundance Writers Fellowship and a CalArts Alpert Award in Theatre.
Like the subject of most of Hoch's monologues, his writings often examine topics in hip hop, race and class and he has been published in The Village Voice, New York Times, Harper's, and The Nation.
He has been featured on HBO's Def Poetry, in addition to his Some People being broadcast on that station. The film version of Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop has recently been released on DVD.
Hoch was cast in a guest role on a 1995 episode of Seinfeld, (season seven, "The Pool Guy"), but alleges that he was replaced after objecting to what he felt was ethnic stereotyping in the way his character was written.
He is also known for writing, Whiteboyz, a limited released 1999 film in which he also starred with Mark Webber and Dash Mihok as three white Iowa teenagers who long for a gangsta rap life. The film also stars Piper Perabo and Eugene Byrd and rappers as luminous as Snoop Doggy Dog, Big Pun, Fat Joe, dead prez, Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh.
