Danielle Bainbridge is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University, where she also holds courtesy appointments in Performance Studies and Black Studies. She was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Black Studies in the 2018-2019 academic year (also at Northwestern University). Her ongoing book project Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive examines the lives of African American sideshow and freak show performers who were also enslaved and is currently under contract with NYU Press (anticipated publication in 2025.) Her project received the support of a Ford Foundation pre-doctoral fellowship (2014-2017). In addition to her academic research, Danielle is a creative writer, playwright, web series creator, and filmmaker. From 2017-2020 she was the co-creator, researcher, writer, and host of the PBS Digital Studios web series "The Origin of Everything," which focused on highlighting unusual and under-told history and streams on YouTube and Facebook. Her digital media work has been honored with Webby and Telly Awards. The channel she co-founded with PBS Digital Studios in 2017 “PBS Origins” has over 580,000 subscribers and 40+ million views on YouTube to date as well as 75,000+ followers on Facebook.
Her creative nonfiction and fiction appear in Moko Magazine, Killens Review of Arts & Letters, and The Mechanics’ Institute Review Online. She was the inaugural winner of the 2015 Barry Lopez Prize for creative nonfiction from Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts (judged by Nick Flynn). Her memoir Dandelion was a semi-finalist for the 2016 Kore Press memoir award, the 2023 St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press, and the 2024 creative nonfiction prize from Autumn House Press. Dandelion won the inaugural 2024 Uplift Voices Nonfiction Prize from Jaded Ibis Press (judged by Myriam Gurba). It is currently under contract and scheduled to be published in 2025. She received a 2016 scholarship from the Tin House creative writing workshop in Portland, Oregon. In 2022 she received the Anne LaBastille Writers Residency presented by the Adirondack Center for Writing to support her creative work. In 2023 she was awarded a virtual writing residency from the Banff Centre in Canada. Her first play "Curio" premiered at the University of Pennsylvania in April 2018 and appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2018. She co-hosted two 2021 Daytime Emmy Nominated web series: PBS Self-Evident and YouTube Originals “Booktube.”
Her essay “The Future Perfect, Autopsy, and Enfreakment on the 19th Century Stage” published in TDR, received an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research. Her essay “Staging Aural Fugitivity Through Nineteenth-Century Freak Show Archives” received an Honorable Mention for 2023 Outstanding Article Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. From 2021-2022 she served as a host, writer, and consulting producer on PBS “Historian’s Take.” Historian’s Take received nominations for the 2023 NAACP Image Awards and 2023 Daytime Emmy Awards. In the 2022-2023 academic year she was a faculty fellow at Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. She is completing her first short documentary based on her 2018 piece “Curio” with $55,000 in grant support from Northwestern’s Office of the Provost and an artist residency from Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle, Washington.
Education
- PhD Yale University, American Studies and African American Studies
- MPhil Yale University, American Studies and African American Studies
- MA Yale University, American Studies and African American Studies
- BA University of Pennsylvania, Theatre Arts and English
Research Interests
- Black Feminist Theory
- 19th-21st century Black arts and culture
- Performance Studies
- Theatre History
- African American Literature (19th c to Contemporary)
- Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Performance (18th c to Contemporary)
- US & Anglophone Caribbean History
- Postcolonial Theory
Recent Publications
- “Making 19th-century Mistresses Ridiculous in The Escape or A Leap for Freedom.” Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies. (Anticipated 2026)
- Short essay on “Celebrity Stages” for anthology Theatre Things: Material Theories and Histories. University of Michigan Press. (Anticipated 2025)
- “The Absent Black Body in the Afterlives of Slavery.” Chapter is part of an ongoing anthology from the University of Chicago’s “Slavery and Visual Culture” working group. (Anticipated 2025)
- “Animal or Alien: Tracing Enfreaked Subjectivities in the 20th Century.” Chapter in Freakery Too anthology, ed. Michael Chemers, Analola Santana, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. (Anticipated 2024)
- “Ruination and a Dramaturgical Reading of Jamaican Women’s Transnational Literature in 1980s US.” Anthology chapter in African American Literature in Transition, 1980-1990. Cambridge University Press. (Winter 2023)
- “Sylvia Wynter, Maskarade and Performing the State.” Feminist Media Histories special issue edited by Allyson Nadia Field on “Speculative Media Histories.” (Summer 2022)
- “Staging Aural Fugitivity Through Nineteenth-Century Freak Show Archives.” Performance Matters special issue “Sound Acts.” (Spring 2022)
- “The Future Perfect, Autopsy, and Enfreakment on the 19th Century Stage." TDR (The Drama Review). (Fall 2020)
- “Stomaching It: A Black Performance Art of Digestion and Endurance.” Anthology chapter in The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art Bloomsbury Press. (February 2020).
Courses
- AFAM 236-0-20: Intro to African American Studies
- AFAM 335-0-20: Race and Literature in 19th Century America
- Theatre 345: African American Theatre, MW 11-12:20
- Theatre 340: Performing the Freak in Pop Culture, MW 3:30-4:50
- Theatre 341: State Funded Theatre of the Americas, MW 11-12:20