People

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 been honored with Webby and Telly Awards. The channel she co-founded with PBS Digital Studios in 2017, “PBS Origins,” has over 725,000 subscribers and 54+ million views on YouTube to date, as well as 86,000+ followers on Facebook. 

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 was a finalist for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award in Nonfiction.  

She received a 2016 scholarship from the Tin House creative writing workshop in Portland, Oregon. In 2022, she received the Anne LaBastille Writers Residency presented by 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 at Ragdale. Her first play, "Curio," premiered at the University of Pennsylvania in April 2018 and appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2018. She co-hosted two 2021 Daytime Emmy-nominated web series: PBS Self-Evident and YouTube Originals “Booktube.” 

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. 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. 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 Sound Design, and Best Wardrobe Hair and Makeup, and won Best Editing. 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.  

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

Anthony Danté Jones is an artist, educator, and arts administrator. A proud DMV native, he has taught in both general population and special education classrooms, created educational and civically minded programming and curricula for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and sung across the world in countries such as Costa Rica, Italy, and Austria, and on stages such as the Harris Theater and Carnegie Hall. He brings his passion for revering our artistic ancestors by studying their works, and his championing of the work of living Black artists through the celebrations of their lives, works, cultures, and food to the Black Arts Consortium at Northwestern University. When he is not in the office, you can likely find him at a concert or gallery, in a bookstore grabbing another edition for an already cluttered collection or cheering on Louisiana State’s Football Team.  

He holds a Master’s in Music from Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University and a Bachelor’s in Music from Louisiana State University. 

Yelaine Rodriguez is an Afro-DominicanYork interdisciplinary artist and scholar focusing on wearable art, sculptures, photography, video installation, and performance. Her work examines Afro-syncretism, ancestral and architectural memory, emphasizing the links between the Caribbean and the United States. Rodriguez earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Fashion Design from Parsons School of Design | The New School in 2013 and later completed a Master of Arts (MA) in Latin American and Caribbean Studies with a concentration in Museum Studies at New York University (NYU) in 2021. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. 

She has participated in various residencies, including the Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) (2017), Wave Hill Van Lier Fellowship (2018), The Latinx Project Curatorial Fellowship at NYU (2019), and the Bronx Museum AIM Program (2020). Rodriguez has exhibited internationally at venues such as ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21 at El Museo del Barrio in New York, the first large-scale national survey of Latinx contemporary art, UNTITLED Art Fair, Photoville, The Shed Open Call, and American Museum of Natural History in the United States, Centro León Biennial XXVII in the Dominican Republic, SurGallery and Critical Distance Centre for Curators in Canada, Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands, Documenta 15 in Germany, and Santa Monica in Barcelona, Spain. 

Her curatorial projects include "Radical Elegance" at Longwood Art Gallery at Hostos (2021), "Afro Syncretic" at NYU (2019-2020), "Resistance, Roots, & Truth" at (CCCADI) (2018), and "(under)REPRESENT(ed)" at Parsons School of Design | The New School (2017). From 2015 to 2018, she founded La Lucha: Dominican Republic and Haiti, One Island, an artist collective dedicated to exploring Dominican-Haitian relations through exhibitions, artist panels, and interactive conferences. Her work has been published in CNN, Artsy, EnFoco, Hyperallergic, Vogue, Aperture, and Elle Magazine. Her writings have also appeared in ARTnews, the academic journal Latin American & Latinx Visual Culture, and "A Handbook of Latinx Art," the first anthology dedicated to documenting the significant contributions of Latinx artists to the American art landscape.