Founder / Peoples Monk / Artistic Director – Dyron Holmes

DYRON HOLMES is a performer, writer, educator and an interfaith universalist monk whose vocation is to “expand the circle of universal faith”. He presently resides in Brooklyn, NY. He will be attending One Spirit Interfaith Seminary in the fall to become an ordained Interfaith Minister.

As a performer he has trained at the Duke Ellington High School of the Arts, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in Dramatic Writing, Playwrights Horizons and the Experimental Theater Wing and the Selavy Arts Center of Commedia dell’Arte in France. He has been seen in productions at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kennedy Center, Syracuse Stage, Joe’s Pub/Public Theater, Crossroads Theater, St. George’s Theater in London and the Al-Bustan International Arts Festival in Beirut, Lebanon. His television and film credits include principal appearances on Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, The Job, NY Undercover, The Hurricane and the upcoming film, Order of Redemption. He is a National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts & NAACP’s ACT-SO Award Recipient in Acting.

As a writer he has written fourteen plays. His first play, Brothers of Time, was a winner of the National Young Playwrights Festival. Subsequently, he received the Young Playwright’s Scholarship to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His plays have been presented at Playwrights Horizons, Church of St. Paul the Apostle, HERE Theater, Baltimore Theater Project, Lark Theater, Genesius Guild, New York University, The New School, Jewish Community Center of Louisville and Off-Stage Bookstore Theater in London. He is currently hard at work on SHEEP: The Trilogy, which is centered around a modern day prophet of universal faith.

As an educator he has taught at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, Jewish Community Center of Louisville, Canaan Christian Development Center (KY), Brooklyn College, Kids Creative, NY Department of Transportation, Planned Parenthood, Children’s Hospital (DC) and Interlocken/ Windsor Mountain’s European Traveling Minstrels (France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain & Portugal.)

As a spiritualist he has practiced and/or intensely studied Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism and the Indigenous African traditions of Ifa. He has performed rituals for people including the creation of an interfaith wedding ceremony between a Jewish American groom and a Chinese Malaysian and Swiss bride in the Santa Monica Mountains. Supernatural highlights include: making Maghrib (sunset prayer) in a three hundred year old mosque in Tripoli, Lebanon; assisting a beloved Trappist monk in the creation of the Advent wreath at the Abbey of Gethsemani; chanting Om Namah Shivayah at the Siddha Yoga Ashram of NY for Maha Shivaratri (Night of Shiva); conversing with the African Dagara Shaman, Malidoma Some at the conference of Indigenous African Spirituality and Ritual; attending a transformative Misa (spiritual mass) amongst authentic Lucumi practitioners; attending an enlightening Jewish Seder with the glorious Prosnit family; witnessing his stepfather - a Methodist pastor - deliver a moving sermon of “The Seven Last Words” on Good Friday; and the most significant of all was beholding the wisdom of “The Teacher” – a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk at the Bodhidharma Zen Buddhist Monastery in Carrollton, KY. It was this meeting with “The Teacher” on April 6th, 2003 that confirmed and sealed his vocation as an interfaith universalist monk.