Daniel Hirsch is a playwright, screenwriter, and journalist. He has written plays that have been performed at the Samuel French Off Off Broadway Festival (a 2019 winner), Actor's Theatre of Louisville, MeetCute LA, City Theater of Pittsburgh, and Antaeus Playwrights Lab, and he has sold a feature film script to MarVista Entertainment. His journalism has appeared in Slate, San Francisco Magazine, SFGate, and The Bold Italic and he has been a recipient of a Society for Professional Journalism award.

Daniel grew up in the Bavarian Rhine Palatinate. In the years prior to his arrival in America, he lived through a period of war, crop failures caused by thunderstorms, and high tax burdens imposed by the Bavarian government. These experiences shaped his life and the way he thought about his place in the world.

He entered the Foreign Service in 1985 and has served in 11 overseas postings. During his career, he has received over a dozen individual awards for performance, including the State Department's Meritorious and Superior Honor Awards and a 2002 Department-wide award for excellence in logistics management.

His advocacy work has included helping to open, close and move embassies and establishing new employee associations, schools and medical clinics in Mali, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Uzbekistan, Nigeria, India, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, Turkmenistan and Tunisia. He has also helped to establish a group, Concerned Foreign Service Officers, that aims to improve transparency and due process in security clearance procedures.

He has been an active member of the American Foreign Service Association since 1985. He has served as a post representative, a member of AFSA's State Standing Committee and a contributor to the Foreign Service Journal. He has co-founded AFSA's Concerned Foreign Service Officers, and he has worked to secure better whistle-blower protection for employees of the United States Federal Government.