Dani is a Philadelphia-based cellist, student, and teacher. They endeavor to make the cello as accessible as possible to everybody, most recently through the Folk Cello Archive and slow practice livestreams.
They've also made music with the Boston Philharmonic, the Richardson Chamber Players, the Delaware Symphony Orchestra, and various other ensembles and contradance bands. In 2012, they released “Ride EP,” a DVD of original multimedia art based upon footage and field recordings taken while living out of a van. They co-founded and served as artistic director of the Ottsville Traditional Arts Center in Bucks County, PA from 2013-6, and have also taught at Maine Fiddle Camp, Fiddle Hell, Summertrios, Princeton in Asia, and Open Access to Music Education. They've studied composition, improvisation, and ethnomusicology at Princeton University, the New England Conservatory, and Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Currently a PhD Candidate in musicology with a graduate minor in Indigenous studies at Cornell University, Dani's scholarly work revolves around themes of decolonization, race, and participation. They've pursued ethnographic fieldwork in Brooklyn, Wet’suwet’en territory, Philadelphia, and Maine, and presented their scholarship at the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Studies Association, the Royal Society of Canada, and the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. Formerly an instructor at Memorial University, they now teach at Cornell, where their most recent seminar was titled “The Politics of Listening: Sound and Civic Life.” During the 2021-2 academic year, they'll be developing and teaching a new seminar titled "Music in the Making and Unmaking of Race" as part of a Don M. Randel Teaching & Research Fellowship.