Joshua Denning is a multidisciplinary creative director, theatre-maker, recording artist, and educator whose work moves across live performance, music, moving image, production design, and creative leadership. His practice begins with the emotional promise of a story and builds outward—uniting image, sound, movement, performance, and design into coherent worlds for audiences.
Joshua is currently Head of Musical Theatre and Assistant Professor of Musical Theatre at Virginia Commonwealth University. Across more than two decades, he has directed and designed more than 50 productions, showcases, revues, and filmed performance projects while leading multidisciplinary teams, developing new programs, and building audiences around ambitious creative work. His direction and design have received recognition for artistic vision, technical execution, ensemble performance, and audience impact, including a Congressional Certificate of Recognition.
As the founder and creative director of O’DANIEL O’DANIEL, Joshua leads a cinematic art-pop project described as queer futurism. He writes and performs original music while directing its larger creative world across narrative music films, visual identity, artwork, typography, promotional media, digital releases, and live-performance development.
Joshua’s international performance career includes Simba in The Lion King, Britney in We Will Rock You, Tick/Mitzi in Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and the title role in the West End workshop of Daddy Cool. His work has included productions and projects associated with Julie Taymor, Ben Elton, Richard Linklater, Elton John, Queen Latifah, Missy Elliott, and Stage Entertainment.
He holds an MFA in Directing from the University of Idaho and a BFA in Musical Theatre from Wright State University. His curriculum work is included in Acting in Musical Theatre: A Comprehensive Course.
Across stages, screens, institutions, and original artistic worlds, Joshua’s work is driven by one central pursuit: creating experiences that make audiences feel something—and leading the people who bring those experiences to life.