Dan Munkus is a painter, musician, and interdisciplinary artist with extensive experience in visual arts, music composition, production and engineering, and cross disciplinary collaborative art making.

Dan was born in Winfield, IL and transplanted to Southern California at an early age setting the foundation for a lifelong search for, and obsession with, the idea of “home”. His earliest experience of feeling a sense of belonging came in his early twenties while attending college at the University of California, Berkeley (BFA Fine Arts Practice 2001). The wide ranging counter culture of the Bay Area merged with the student body’s and faculty’s sense of intellectual curiosity was a point of awakening for Munkus.

This period led Munkus to the discovery of Zen Buddhism and a devoted meditation practice lasting seven years. While no longer a practicing Buddhist, the Zen sensibility and search for inner knowledge and understanding, even the aesthetic of Zen paintings, still influence his work and life twenty years later.

Dan moved to New York City in his late twenties where he fully invested himself in the act of music making in all its forms. In 2013 he earned his MFA in Performance and Interactive Media Arts at Brooklyn College where he formed more long term friendships and collaborative connections while working in the theatrical and performing arts.

Emerging from a health scare in the fall of 2023, now married with two children, Dan has shifted his attention away from the grind of music production to seek out a creative life that is both robust and conducive to healthy living. That shift has led Munkus back to his earliest passion of mark making and a deeply felt and surprising painting practice.

Dan makes work in Peekskill, NY where he lives with his beautiful wife and two children. He has released many musical works under his given name, with his band Old Robes, as The Atomic Boxer, more recently as Polka Dot Deli, and working as a producer/engineer with other artists. He has made work internationally and has toured across the United States performing his solo works of music. He has also begun the process of preparing for two solo shows of his paintings in the fall of 2024 and the spring of 2025. He can be found most days painting in his backyard studio, tinkering with music, or at the gym. For inquiries please contact Dan at dmunkus@gmail.com

I paint in oil and resin in an attempt to arrest the flow of time - to freeze it in order to better understand the contents of my own life, surroundings, and memories. My paintings are Rorschach blots in practice, unfolding in front of me as I adopt a posture of open-ended listening. Archetypal forms and formal marks usually arise out of this state of listening, triangles that resemble pyramids, Zen ensō (circular) marks, simple boats, trees, fire, figure-like brush strokes, and horizon lines that define a landscape. Often simple color schemes come to encapsulate each painting but as they hover or rest above layer after layer of painted over imagery a sense of depth and time emerges. When employed, resin also accomplishes this state of depth (as it relates to memory) creating almost holographic moments of perception within the frame.

Having returned to painting after twenty years away my relationship to the practice feels fresh and alive. This primal ability and instinct to make a visual and physical mark on a surface has afforded me a second shot at a creative life mid-life, and a new means by which to explore the conversation happening in my own head. As my practice deepens, painting has become for me an internal mapping system laying out both the places I’ve been, the ones I imagine, and the places I have yet to be.

Once a Zen devotee, painting acts as a stand-in meditation practice where I leave myself open to explore any thought or feeling that may arise. Thoughts of loss, the search for mental and physical health, my bicultural heritage (half Filipino, half Caucasian), and a reimagined religious sensibility have joined my overactive philosopher’s mind as the prime drivers of my current batch of paintings.

Club Fit Jefferson Valley - Solo Exhibition - Nov. 2024

John C. Hart Memorial Library - Solo Exhibition - March 2025

Hendrick Hudson Free Library - Solo Exhibition - Sept. 2025

Super Secret Projects - Personal Protest - Group Show Sept. 2024

Polka Dot Deli - Oft Come Devil - Aug. 2024

Kinosaito Community Art Benefit Show - Dec. 2023

No Grudges - "I Need Somebody" - Aug. 2023 (co-engineer)

The Atomic Boxer and Oh My Friend - Fist and Stone - June 2023

Dan Munkus / John Jannone - The Edge of the High Trace (Animation by John Jannone) - Winner Best Experimental Animation at Experimental, Dance, and Music Film Festival, 2022

Rachel Epp - "Cool Kids in the Cheap Seats" - June 2022 (composer, co-produced with Tommy White, engineer/mix engineer)

Aviva Jaye - "So Close" - May 2022 (co-produced with Tommy White, engineer/mix engineer)

Dan Munkus - "Joy Patterns" - Jan 2022

Dan Munkus - The Edge of the High Trace - Nov. 2021

Subtle Soup Records - 2013-2020 - Founder/Principal

Old Robes / John Jannone - "Soldier Online" Animation - Winner Best Animation Feedback Experimental Film Festival

Old Robes - The Spider and the Spectator - April 2018

Robot Immigrants - My Heart is a Traveler - April 2013

Old Robes - Past the Suitors - Nov. 2012

The Nights Bears - Clytemnestra - Oct. 2012

The Night Bears - Meat & Light - Sept. 2012

Diverse Plots Ensemble - Diverse Plots - May 2012

The Night Bears - Assumptions Made in the Dark - Dec. 2011

Artsbridge Scholarship Recipient - Spring 2001