David Schein grew up in Burlington VT. He attended the writer's workshop at the University of Iowa and, as an artist in residence at the Iowa Center for New Performing Arts, appeared in works by Robert Wilson and Lucanio Berio and co-founded the physical theater company, The Iowa Theater Lab. In Berkeley,CA he co-founded, with John O'Keefe and Robert Ernst, the theater ensemble, the Blake Street Hawkeyes. At the Hawkeye Studio at 2019 Blake Street, with the writer Jim Nisbet, he produced the "Actualist Conventions," which premiered the work of George Coates, Whoopi Goldberg and Ellen Sebastian and many other West Coast artists. In 1983 he created the gender- bending solo work "Out Comes Butch," which he subsequently toured in North America and Europe for 35 years. He wrote with and toured with Whoopi Goldberg in the USA, Canada and Europe and was a contributing writer to her breakthrough solo show, "Whoopi Goldberg on Broadway." In 1986, with Guillermo Gomez Peña, he wrote and recorde
"Border X Frontera" for NPR. His opera "TOKENS: A Play on the Plague," won 3 Bay Area Critics Awards and 3 Hollywood Dramalogue awards. In 2002 Schein founded One Love AIDS/HIV Awareness Theater in Awassa Ethiopia with a band of street kids, who called themselves Southern Dawn Circus, and collaborated with them for many years creating shows in Ethiopian market places and refugee camps about HIV/AIDS, gender equality and against female circumcision. His long-standing collaboration with German artists and Pumpen-haus Theater in Münster, DE resulted in "The Return of the Jewish Woman," and most recently "Blake and Me and the Universe" and "Songs from TOKENS." Schein has written 3 books, "My Murder and Other Local News," a collection of performance poems, and "The Adoption, a novel about Ethiopia and the USA and and illustated edition of "TOKENS: A Play on the Plague. His essay "Incident in Awassa" was selected as one the best articles of 25 years in American Theater Magazine.