Biography

She was born in Grinnell, Iowa but resided in her parents' native Zimbabwe from ages five to eighteen, when she returned to the United States to attend college.

Speaks four languages fluently: English, French, Shona, and basic Xhosa.

Danai means "loving each other" in Shona.

Received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota (2001).

Co-founded Almasi Arts Inc., an organization dedicated to supporting arts education in Zimbabwe (2011). She currently serves as the Executive Artistic Director.

[on preparing to play a sword-wielding zombie slayer in The Walking Dead (2010)] I do have some dings on my apartment wall from tricks I was attempting at home. I don't advise that.

I was a jock when I was a kid, so I've always wanted to physically live through a character - one of those really tough chicks.

[on what steered her towards writing about the personal in her play "Familiar"] My artistic mandate up to that point had always been: "I'm not going to talk about things close to myself. I want to go into viral issues about people who you never heard or see" ...And I watched my own family's dynamics, my own dynamics amongst my kin, and the dynamics of how these cultures had merged, and interacted, and clashed. And I just found the absurdity of our familial dynamics...

[on trying to make her characters relatable to various types of audiences] I think that's a goal in all my plays honestly, to get into the personal, but to have a macro ramification, or to look at things that people can look at as a statistic or stereotype in one way, and to make them have to spend time with a person that they may even end up relating to a little in some strange, tiny way, to see the complexity of something they might have thought of as something simply statistic and "over there somewhere".

[on what made her want to write about African themes] In terms of writing, I just wasn't finding enough stories about contemporary African people - or historical, just anything, the whole gamut. I was raised in southern Africa and I came back to the West for college. I was starting to look for what I would like to perform, what I would like to see put to life onstage, and I was finding many stories about everybody else, but none about my own people. My playwriting became a "necessity being the mother of invention" type thing. I wasn't finding what I wanted to perform, so I started to create it myself.