Adam Daveline
Adam Daveline is a director, actor, producer, and co-founder of MOD Productions. A classically trained actor with more than twenty years of experience on Broadway, Off-Broadway, television, and film, Adam brings an actor’s understanding of performance and a lifelong obsession with how stories come together to his work as a director.
My Story
I’ve been making movies since I was 9 years old.
Back then, it meant commandeering my dad’s camcorder, convincing whoever was around to be in whatever I was making, and figuring out how to turn the story in my head into something we could actually watch. Of course always I loved performing, but I was just as fascinated by everything happening around the performance.
That curiosity never really went away. I earned my BFA in Music Dance Theatre from BYU and my MFA in Classical Acting from the University of San Diego/Old Globe, then spent more than twenty years working as an actor on Broadway, Off-Broadway, television, film, and stages across the country. But even when I was hired as an actor, I was always interested in how the whole thing came together. Directors began bringing me into the development of new work because they valued my ideas in the room as much as what I brought as a performer.
Eventually, I started my own theatre company and began producing and directing Off-Broadway. That was where instinct became practice. Production after production, I learned what worked, what didn’t, and what kind of director I wanted to be. Later, studying film directing at UCLA gave me the opportunity to put formal craft and technique around years of practical experience.
All of that shapes how I direct today. I love actors, I love collaboration, and I believe strongly that the best idea wins. My job isn’t always to have the best idea. It’s to recognize it, shape it, and bring everyone’s work together to support it.
Today, Andrea and I develop film, television, and digital projects through MOD Productions. In a lot of ways, I’m still doing what I did with my dad’s camcorder, getting a bunch of people to help me make the thing in my head real. The cameras are just more expensive now.