Donald Travis Stewart (aka Trav S.D.) is a leading figure in the New Vaudeville and Indie Theater movements, an author, journalist, playwright, and stage performer. Following two years in the development office of the Big Apple Circus in 1995, he founded his company Mountebanks, a platform for producing original theatre pieces and vaudeville shows. He first began to attract notice in 1998 as one of a number of Lower East Side “performance comedians” colloquially known as Art Stars, working at alternative night clubs and theatres such as Surf Reality, Collective Unconscious, Todo Con Nada, and The Present Company’s now defunct Theatorium. In 2001, he was featured in an Adam Gopnik article for The New Yorker about “New Burlesque.”
Portrait by Bill Scurry
