About

Danielle Bainbridge is an Associate 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 book, 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 (January 2026, NYU Press). 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 earned Webby and Telly Awards. The channel she co-founded with PBS Digital Studios in 2017, “PBS Origins,” has over 738,000 subscribers and 57+ million views on YouTube to date, as well as 86,000+ followers on Facebook.

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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 (as a manuscript) for the  2016 Kore Press memoir award, the 2023 St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press, the 2024 creative nonfiction prize from Autumn House Press, and runner-up for the Gournay Prize from Ohio State University Press. Dandelion won the inaugural 2024 Uplift Voices Nonfiction Prize from Jaded Ibis Press and was published in November 2025 (judged by Myriam Gurba). Dandelion was shortlisted for the 2026 William Saroyan Prize presented by Stanford University Libraries and won the 2026 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Zora Award in Nonfiction. 

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She received a 2016 scholarship from the Tin House creative writing workshop in Portland, Oregon. In 2022, she received the Anne LaBastille Writers Residency from 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. She was a summer fiction fellow at the VONA writers’ workshop in 2025 and received a 2026 artist residency from Ragdale. 

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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 the 2023 Outstanding Article Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She co-hosted two 2021 Daytime Emmy-nominated web series: PBS Self-Evident and YouTube Originals “Booktube.” From 2021-2022, she served as a host, writer, and consulting producer on PBS's “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. 

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Her first play, "Curio," premiered at the University of Pennsylvania in April 2018 and appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2018. She completed her first short documentary in 2026 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. Curio premiered at the Sayville International Film Festival in August 2026, where it was nominated for Best Director, Best Art Direction, Best Editing, and Best Wardrobe Hair and Makeup, winning Best Editing and Best Art Direction. Danielle is the Secretary for the American Society for Theatre Research (2026-2029), the Director of Northwestern’s Black Arts Consortium (2026-2029), and the Director of Graduate Studies for the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern. 

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She is currently working on a satirical novel about a cult run by Black women and her second academic book project on state-funded arts and theatre in the postcolonial Anglophone Caribbean.