Danielle Bainbridge

Danielle Bainbridge is a writer, academic, playwright, and web series host soon to be living in Chicago. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in English and Theatre Arts and has a PhD from Yale University in African American Studies and American Studies. She’s a postdoc in African American Studies at Northwestern and will begin a professorship in the Department of Theatre (also at Northwestern) in the fall of 2019. She is the researcher, writer, and host of the PBS Digital Studios web series “The Origin of Everything” which focuses on highlighting unusual and under told histories. You can watch the episodes on Youtube and Facebook. She also has an upcoming collaboration to serve as an online host for videos for the History Channel, through 45^th & Dean of the A+E Network. Her academic book project in progress “Refinements of Cruelty: Enslavement, Enfreakment, and the Performance Archive” examines the lives of African American sideshow and freak show performers who were also enslaved. Her creative nonfiction and fiction appears 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 non-fiction from Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts (judged by Nick Flynn). Her collection of memoir and non-fiction essays in progress, A Denser Darkness, was chosen as a semi-finalist for the Kore Press 2016 memoir award. She received a 2016 scholarship from the Tin House creative writing workshop in Portland, Oregon. Her first play “Curio” premiered at the University of Pennsylvania in April 2018 and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2018. She is a Ravenclaw, a lover of TV shows about surgical mishaps, and a novelty t-shirt connoisseur.