Danielle Drees

Dr. Danielle Drees is a scholar of contemporary performance, literature, and time-based media. Currently the Marsted Curatorial Fellow for Contemporary Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT, Dr. Drees studies how feminist, queer, disabled, and working-class artists have used performance and other aesthetic forms as sites of political experimentation.

Her book, Sleep with Spectators: Feminist Performance and Practice, is out from the University of Minnesota Press in September 2026. Dr. Drees’ research appears in Signs, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Frontiers, Performance Research, and Theatre Journal. She was a 2025 plenary speaker for the American Society for Theater Research annual meeting, and has given gallery talks for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the University of Cambridge’s Women’s Art Collection. Her next project is a biography of the genderfluid 17th-century performer Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse.

Dr. Drees’ 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.