Danielle Drees is a scholar of contemporary performance and time-based media. 

She is Marsted Curatorial Fellow for Contemporary Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. Her book Sleep with Spectators: Feminist Performance and Practice is out from the University of Minnesota Press in September 2026.

Danielle’s public scholarship on sleep, feminism, and performance includes an exhibition talk for the Women’s Art Collection and an episode of the podcast Sleep is the New Sex. Her 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.

Danielle’s next project is a biography of the genderfluid seventeenth-century performer Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse. Danielle has talked and written about Moll’s world for the Dead Ladies Project and the Map of Early Modern London.

Danielle received her PhD with distinction in Theatre and Performance from Columbia University and holds degrees from Cambridge University and Harvard College. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Boston University, she has taught at Harvard, Emerson College, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Write Danielle an email here.