David Schein grew up in Burlington VT. He attended the writer's workshop at the University of Iowa & as an artist in residence at the Iowa Center for New Performing Arts, appeared in works by Robert Wilson & Lucanio Berio & co-founded the physical theater company, The Iowa Theater Lab. In Berkeley, CA he co-founded, with John O'Keefe & 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, Ellen Sebastian & many other West Coast artists. In 1983 he created the gender- bending solo work "Out Comes Butch," which he subsequently toured in North America & Europe for 35 years. He wrote with & 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 & re-corded "Border X Fron
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 & collaborated with them for many years creating shows in Ethiopian market places and refugee camps about HIV/AIDS, gender equality and against female circum-cision. His long-standing collaboration with German artists at Pumpenhaus Theater in Münster, DE resulted in "The Return of the Jewish Woman," and most recently "Blake and Me and the Uni-verse" & "Songs from TOKENS." Schein has written 4 books, all published by Fomite Press; "My Murder and Other Local News," a collection of performance poems, "The Adoption," a novel about Ethiopia/USA, the illustated edition of "TOKENS: A Play on the Plague," and "Stones – decontruction of Zion" His essay "Incident in Awassa" was selected as one the best articles of 25 years in American Theater Magazine.