Contact Info
David Gorshein
Continuing Lecturer
David Gorshein teaches at UCLA, where he leads high-enrollment courses that explore storytelling, performance, and cultural engagement. He is also a creative leader who uses those same principles to shape brand strategy and experience.
As a senior director at The Sheppard Group, Gorshein shapes strategic vision and creative execution for Fortune 500 brands such as Taco Bell, USTA, Pizza Hut, and Chase. He leads multidisciplinary teams across content strategy, experiential marketing, and copy development, bringing campaigns to life through storytelling and immersive experiences.
His work spans experiential activations, video concepting, executive presentations, and strategic consulting, including market research, delivering creative solutions for both external campaigns and internal communications.
He led creative direction, casting, and messaging for Taco Bell’s Drag Brunch tour, a national, sold-out campaign run in partnership with the It Gets Better Project that generated millions of impressions and was featured in The New York Times.
At UCLA, Gorshein designs and teaches courses that use theater as a lens to explore behavior, influence, and audience engagement. His classes combine academic depth with real-world applications, earning institutional awards and consistently strong student feedback. He also collaborates with UCLA Admissions and has held prior teaching appointments at Loyola Marymount University and California State University, Long Beach.
Gorshein’s research has appeared in Theatre Journal, The Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, and in the book A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias. He has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and has written on culture for HuffPost.
He holds a Ph.D. in Theater and Performance from UCLA and a B.A. in Communication from the University of Michigan.
A GLAAD Media Award nominee, Gorshein made history with his husband, Scott Cronick, when their wedding—officiated by Conan O’Brien—became the first same-sex marriage to air on late-night TV.
