(Founder of Arts-in-Action)
Dr. Dani Lyndersay, PhD, was born in Australia to Dutch and Canadian parents. Throughout her life, she has lived and educated in Indonesia, Holland, Portugal & Canada. Dani attended high school in Canada; studied at the Banff School of Fine Arts & Guildhall School of Music & Arts. She studied at RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) London; University of Victoria, Canada, where she was successfully awarded a Masters of Arts in Theatre in Education; University of Ibadan Nigeria, where she was awarded a PhD in Theatre, costume design.
As numerous as the institutions she has studied in, are the places she has been an educator. She has taught in Israel, Nigeria (19 years- where she created the Walket Puppets Theatre Troupe), and Trinidad and Tobago (29 years). She married Trinidadian director, playwright and lighting designer Dexter Lyndersay in Nigeria, with whom she later shared two sons – Adam & Sean and now seven grandchildren.
Dani’s life work reflects the research interests that she has invested in for 40 plus years- African dress and design; and educative theatre. As a teacher/facilitator of theatre arts for over four decades, she has designed over 25 productions for the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Department of Creative and Festival Arts and the wider Caribbean community, since her move to Trinidad and Tobago in 1990. She is the awardee of 4 Caciques: Acting (The Killing of Sister George), Production (Fallen Angel & the Devil’s Concubine), Co-Directing (Black Jacobins) and Set Design (Shango Tales of the Orishas).
In 1992, Dani, with the help of Caribbean scholar and friend Mr. Rawle Gibbons, founded Arts-in-Action (AiA). In that same year, Lyndersay began a program called It Fits, designed to help primary school children with mathematics. The University of West Indies, being AiA’s home base since its inception, a relationship honoured by the receipt of the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in 2002, saw subsequent integration as a unit of the university system. AiA was marked to revolutionize how the region engaged theatre. To achieve this, the company, borrowing from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the oppressed, created an interactive forum where the workshop participants are encouraged to think critically about social issues, air their viewpoints and work towards a solution or constructive approach. This approach, has engaged now over 500,000 participants and is used as a teaching model for the University of the West Indies’, Department of Creative and Festival Arts’ educative theatre courses.Dani’s passion for theatre remains wired in the DNA of Arts-in-Action, as the company celebrates its 26th year in 2020. Innovative, forwarding thinking, nurturing , revolutionary , trailblazing , outstanding ; are all words used to describe Dani, her vision and the years of service she has given to Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean region , and the rest of the world.