Danielle Drees

Dr. Danielle Drees writes about bodies, labor, and politics in literature and the performing arts. She studies how feminist, queer, disabled, and working-class artists have used theater and other aesthetic forms as sites of political experimentation.

Danielle's first book, Sleep with Spectators: Feminist Performance and Practice, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in Fall 2026. Her scholarship also appears in Signs, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Frontiers, Performance Research, Theatre Journal, and the forthcoming Palgrave textbook Teaching Writing in Theatre and Performance Studies. Danielle's next book project is a researched biography of the 17th-century nonbinary performer Moll Cutpurse.

At Emerson, Danielle teaches classes in feminist and trans/queer literature. She also teaches as a visiting lecturer on theater, dance, and media at Harvard and a museum teacher in the galleries of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Danielle's work has been supported by the American Society for Theater Research; Boston University's Kilachand Honors College; Northeastern University's Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; the Heyman Center for the Humanities; Columbia University's Graduate Writing Studio; and New York University Abu Dhabi.

In fall 2025, Danielle will be a plenary speaker at the American Society for Theater Research annual meeting and will give an exhibition talk for the Women's Art Collection at the University of Cambridge.