About Danielle
Danielle Rhodes, a Middle Eastern/Armenian, Ashkenazi Jew, is a proud born and raised Jersey Girl. Growing up in Bergen County, she was able to experience her two greatest loves regularly throughout her childhood– art and sports. Whether going to a Broadway show and eating hot, street pretzels snuck in during intermission with her mom or catching a Yankees game with her dad, she relished every experience.
After high school she ventured down south to UNC-Chapel Hill and played violin in the UNC orchestra and fell in love with Carolina Basketball. While majoring in English and minoring in creative writing, Danielle also had the opportunity to work in the Archives department. Her job was to organize newly donated materials so they could be processed and cataloged, which was mostly really old papers with the occasional jar of baby teeth, lock of hair, and once a glass eye, which proceeded to roll out of the box, onto the floor, and across the room.
She then moved to Charlotte to get her masters in English at UNC-Charlotte. Her thesis used Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth to predict what the narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man does after the novel ends. She was able to teach her own courses during this time and fell in love with teaching, which led to the decision to get her PhD. She moved to Atlanta and specialized in Postmodern American Literature and Critical Theory.
Her dissertation examined American War narratives and argued how soldiers use performative masculinity as a way to cope with trauma.
While writing, Danielle also began acting in community theatre. After almost a decade of academia, Danielle relocated to Washington, DC right before the pandemic. In a new city, she was able to build a small tutoring business and worked with K-12 students and taught online classes. Her most popular class used graphic novels to teach literary analysis to middle schoolers. She also decided to enroll in Theatre Lab’s Honors Conservatory.
Since the world began to open up, Danielle has been on stage, in front of camera, or behind a mic ever since. Some of her favorite projects she has worked on are Romeo and Juliet at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, which was solely for local eighth graders reading the play in school and being the voice of the Library of Congress’ special exhibit on the Declaration of Independence, where she can be heard reading excerpts from the document.
