Daniel A. Cozzens ’03

From common casting his first-year fall to his unopposed election as president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC), Daniel A. Cozzens ’03 says he can’t stress enough how wonderful his experience has been with the arts at Harvard.

“I think the drama community especially is very open,” he says. “I’ve grown to love it.”

At Arts First, Cozzens will receive the Louise Donovan Award, which recognizes outstanding work behind the scenes in the arts. Since his first year at Harvard, he says he’s discovered theater in everything he does—even in biological anthropology, his concentration.

“There’s a similar investigation into what makes us human, and what types of things are common to mankind,” he says.

In high school, Cozzens participated in some theatrical productions and performed in several small ensemble parts when he first arrived at Harvard. But he says he felt “very sort of unfulfilled in the other aspects of my life.” Academics did not interest him as much as he had hoped, he says, so instead he turned to theater and decided to begin taking on more responsibility.

Cozzens joined the HRDC and began working behind the scenes.

“This community had become a large part of me and who I was at Harvard, and I wanted to help it,” he says.

He says he loved the enthusiasm and new ideas the members brought with them.

“Undergraduate theater at Harvard is very self-propelled, very entrepreneurial,” he says. “Basically everything is on you, and that spirit was really exciting.”

In the fall of his junior year, he was elected president of HRDC.

Cozzens has also been heavily involved with the Harvard-Radcliffe Summer Theater (HRST), and in 2002 directed a successful production of Macbeth in the courtyard of Hilles Library.

“Macbeth brought together a lot of that excitement in the face of what on the surface seemed like insurmountable odds,” he says. “It was a very transformative event for that space and for me.”

Cozzens says has no concrete plans for the future, but he says he’ll continue to engage in theater in some way.

“Performance is everywhere and has always been everywhere from the beginning of time,” he says.