Hello there! Thank you for checking out my page. 

My name is Daniel Isengart, and my last name is pronounced like this: Ease ‘n guard.

That’s what my work and life are all about: ease and guard – freedom and control. Just the right mix of it.

I grew up in France and Germany, where I trained as a dancer before moving to NYC, in my early 20s. I soon started to perform as a solo entertainer in cabarets and nightclubs, specializing in vintage Franco-German chanson. After twenty years of performing and producing nightclub acts, I returned to my original love of opera and classical music and set out to bring my understanding of the art of performing to classically trained singers, coaching them in acting skills and stagecraft. This led to directing and staging showcases, recitals and operas.

Professional Experience

• Taught courses and gave lectures about performing arts history at NYU SPS, the Gallatin School and Duke University.

• Taught Performance Masterclasses at Bard College, The San Francisco Conservatory and Wilfried Laurier University

• Directed semi-staged operas with the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony Orchestra under the batons or Edwin Outwater and Andrei Feher

• Hosted and staged a series of performances at the Sun Valley Music Festival

• Coaching classically trained singers in performance skills for Classic Lyric Arts’s summer programs since 2021

• Held monthly Masterclasses for singers in the salon of Opera critic Meche Kroop

• Staged showcases for Classic Lyric Arts and Bare Opera

• Created multiple cabaret shows, presented in places as diverse as Café Sabarsky at Neue Galerie, the BAM Café, Joe’s Pub, MoMA, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Deutsches Haus at NYU, and a speakeasy in Soho

I am a faculty member of Classic Lyric Arts and a board member of the web interview series Living the Classical Life, hosted by Zsolt Bognár.