Dana Edell

Activist-Scholar-Artist-Educator.

Dana Edell (she/her), PhD, MFA, is an activist-scholar-artist-educator. She has produced and co-directed 80+ original, activist plays written and performed by teenagers addressing social and racial justice issues. She is the former Executive Director of SPARK Movement, a global girls activist organization that used arts-based methods to launch and win successful action campaigns leading to social, corporate and policy change from 2012-2017. She was co-chair of the Girls’ Participation Task Force at the United Nations where she directed annual theater productions written by girls from 20+ countries and is currently the Director of EmersonTHEATRE, an afterschool theater and social justice program for Boston area teenagers. She has published chapters and articles about her feminist, activist, participatory research in more than a dozen academic books and journals, and currently serves as Co-Editor of Youth Theatre Journal. Her first book, Girls, Performance and Activism: Demanding to Be Heard was published by Routledge in 2022. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts where she is an Assistant Professor of Applied Theatre at Emerson College where she teaches courses in performance and activism.