David González began telling stories at the age of seven when his uncle Jose made him a puppet theater and his mother hung a pair of red velvet curtains on it. Since then he has performed to more than 2500 audiences across the county including; The Royal National Theater (London), Lincoln Center, The Smithsonian Institution, The International Festival of Arts and Ideas, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, The Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, The Ordway Performing Arts Center, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, The Detroit Institute for the Arts, Santa Fe Stages, The Philadelphia Art Museum, etc., and hundreds of elementary, middle and high schools throughout North America. David wrote, co-composed and performed the critically acclaimed ¡Sofrito! with Larry Harlow and The Latin Legends Band, which brought storytelling to Broadway and enjoyed a sold-out run at The New Victory Theater. Double Crossed; The Saga of the St. Louis, a piece about the Holocaust was commissioned and premiered by the Smithsonian Institution, with a re-staging at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. David had a triumphant return to Broadway with MytholoJazz, the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice set to the hip jazz sounds of the D.D. Jackson Trio, at the New Victory Theater. Mr. Gonzalez returned to the Royal National Theatre with Word Up. He was honored with the Helen Hayes Performing Artist of the Year Award. David is currently working on The Secret of the Ceiba Tree, (a new community-based work in conjunction with Cleveland Playhouse Square with the support of an Arts Partners grant), and The Frog Bride, a Russian fairy tale set to the music of Prokofiev and the art of Kandinsky sponsored by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Mr. Gonzalez' poetry was featured on Bill Moyers' documentary Fooling with Words on PBS, as well as NPR's All Things Considered. He is a poet/commentator for Studio 360, a nationally syndicated radio program on the PRI network. David has read his poetry at numerous venues including the Nuyorican Poets Café, colleges, conferences, and performing arts centers across the country, and was a featured reader for Lincoln Center's Out-of-Doors Festival in 2001. His poems are included in Give Me a World of Art, a new collection of poetry published by The Center for Educational Outreach and Innovation at Columbia University Press. For eight seasons David was the host of New York Kids, the award-winning interactive radio program on NPR's New York affiliate, WNYC. He received his doctorate in Music Therapy from New York University's School of Education where he was also an adjunct professor. He recently debuted As if The Past Were Listening at The Lincoln Center Institute, and The Poetic License Band a Latin-jazz/spoken word project with Grammy nominated drummer Bobby Sanabria. David lives in Chestnut Ridge, NY with his wife (jazz vocalist Lisa Sokolov), and their two children. Online at www.davidgonzalez.com and www.rainartproductions.com.