We’d like to give a warm welcome to Dani Snyder-Young, the new Faculty Director of Northeastern’s Center for the Arts! In this new role, Dani will lead the Center’s expansion into a multi-sited hub with a dedicated arts-integrated research wing.

About Dani:

Dani is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Northeastern. Her artistic research centers on community-partnered projects examining how theater practices support human thriving in public health and public policy contexts.

She leads the Data Theatre Collaborative, developing innovative methods for translating quantitative data into theatrical experiences that support community deliberation. This initiative operates at the intersection of performance, data science, and civic engagement, involving partnerships with scholars in interaction design, data visualization, journalism, and public policy.  She is also a Faculty Fellow at Northeastern’s Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research, where her work examines how theatre participation supports recovery from problematic substance use. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arts Work Fund for Organizational Development, and the American Association of University Women.

Her most recent book, Sticking Stigma: Affect, Performance, and the Movement of Social Norms (Vanderbilt, 2026), incorporates frameworks drawn from public and behavioral health to analyze a range of applied performance interventions. It examines the cultural technologies of power artists and cultural producers employ to manipulate stigma and its resulting affects in performance projects oriented toward the alleviation of social inequalities. Her other books include Privileged Spectatorship: Theatrical Interventions in White Supremacy (Northwestern, 2020), Theatre of Good Intentions: Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social Change (Palgrave, 2013), and Impacting Theatre Audiences: Methods for Studying Change (co-edited with Matt Omasta; Routledge, 2022). She serves as President-Elect of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.