Danielle is a lyric coloratura soprano with experience interpreting a range of roles. Her favorite performed roles include Handel’s Rodelinda, Josephine (H.M.S. Pinafore), Belinda (Dido and Aeneas), Serpina (La serva padrona), La Musique (Les plaisirs de Versailles), Donna Anna (Don Giovanni), Adele (Die Fledermaus), and Contessa di Folleville (Il viaggio a Reims). She is an avid concert soloist, from Bach and Vivaldi to Beethoven and Verdi.

 

In 2024, she had the honor of representing the United States at the Silk Road International Festival in Xi'an, China, where she performed Juliette's aria "Je veux vivre" and American musical theatre classics in addition to performing with entertainers from 7 other countries, including Modern Balkan Traditionalist Slobodan Trkulja. 

​

Danielle is the Academic Coordinator of the Brisch Center for Historical Performance.Specializing in historically informed performance and style embodiment, Danielle performs and teaches the learned styles (17th/18th-centuries) and bel canto (19th-century) in opera. She is equally skilled and passionate about Golden Age musical theatre (20th-century). 

​​​

Danielle is an eager advocate of new music and new works. Her recent recital programming highlights creative women and persons of color historically marginalized in the classical idiom. In 2023, she commissioned two new art songs for her solo recital Contemporary Song Cycles and Commissions by Chris Prather and Hannah Helbig. She also premiered the micro-opera commission of living composer Jacob Frost’s How Can I Keep from Singing?, where she explored modern vocal extended techniques and intense acting as a patient in an insane asylum. In 2021-22, she produced a new Oklahoma opera, No Justice, No Peace, by Prather, too. She is particularly proud of that timely and poignant project as it represents the powerful impact opera has in the present.

​

Danielle is deeply dedicated to musical outreach and public education, specifically exposing the community to opera and classical vocal music. In 2016, she founded the Oklahoma City chapter of Opera on Tap, a

501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides performing opportunities for local professional singers in the metropolitan area. This has now become a successful local entity called OK City Opera, of which she is the Artistic Director. She regularly programs, performs, and emcees monthly events. 

Danielle has taught musicians for thirteen years, with nine years teaching at the higher ed level. Danielle is the Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Central Oklahoma School of Music, where she teaches music history courses, applied vocal lessons, lyric diction, opera history, and research/writing courses. She started her career in higher education as an adjunct professor at Oklahoma City Community College and also worked on staff at the University of Oklahoma.

​​

In the academic classroom, she endeavors to actualize spheres of learning that captivate and compel students. Her curricula are student-centered, emphasizing cognitive development that moves beyond mere establishment of knowledge but rather seek to build the skills to synthesize, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. Moreover, she integrates multiple modes of learning and teaching methods into instruction so that students engage with class content through varied activities. Her instruction tends to commence from an egalitarian desire for liberated learning. While a resource to her students, she emphasizes how they are resources unto themselves by implementing embodied dialogue. 

​

As a voice pedagogue, Danielle has had the privilege of teaching hundreds of students over the past decade. Beyond her studio at the university, she maintains a private studio. Her career-centric students are successful secondary and primary music educators as well as aspiring performers.  

 

Teaching through a holistic approach, she works with singers and pianists to develop healthy technique as well as cultivating communication skills so they can clearly express ideas. In addition, she has crafted detailed processes to help students learn music and language efficiently. Danielle is committed to helping her students gain the tools to be empowered musicians.

 

In addition to 20+ years of vocal training, Danielle is a trained pianist, having played for 29 years, and offers those skills during coachings. She is a member of the College Music Society, National Association of Teachers of Singing, Early Music America, and the Rousseau Association.

​

​

​

​

Danielle's scholarship approaches music as embodied and lived experience, with specific investigations in eighteenth- and twenty-first century opera, culture, philosophy, and commissions. As a musicologist, she specializes in performance studies and opera studies. Drawn to musical theatre's collaborative nature that merges multiple artistic disciplines into one art form: music, aesthetics, dramaturgy, versification, acting, costumery, dance, stagecraft, her various research efforts shed light on these multi-modal dimensions.

​

Though disparate centuries, her primary research focuses on both eighteenth-century French culture and philosophy, as well as contemporary American opera. Her dissertation centers on the latter, considering the pioneering operatic institutions who have helped shape new American opera. Through extensive interviews with industry leaders, Danielle is illuminating trends in commissioning, composition, production, and consumption in the early twenty-first century. Her dissertation is currently being reshaped as the monograph Commissioning Opera in the Twenty-first Century to be published in 2026. Other current writing topics are focused on Jean-Philippe Rameau as well as embodying Baroque gesture. 

​

As a performative musicologist, Danielle has presented on these topics internationally and nationally with the National Opera Association, American Musicological Society (Southwest), Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, College Music Society, National Association of Teachers of Singing, the Rousseau Association, and the International Gender and Sexuality Studies Conference.

 

Beyond historical musicology, her research interests intersect with her other role as a pedagogue, including neuroeducation and voice science. ​Her current inquiry project, focused on Embodied Dialogue, connects recent neuroscience learning theories to historical Enlightenment ideologies and sense theories. 

​

Recent publications include two reviews for Cambridge Core’s Nineteenth-Century Music Review, the article “Two Schemata for Embodied Cognition in Student Singers,” and two book chapters “Musical Moral Sense in Rousseau’s Essai” and “Sensibilité, Self-Sacrifice, and the Sentimental.” A book chapter on embodying Rameau and a textbook biography on Rameau are both forthcoming.