Danielle Rosvally, Ph.D.
Fight Director, Director, Dramaturg, Academic
Danielle Rosvally is an assistant professor of theatre and resident violence consultant/fight director at the University at Buffalo. There, she teaches classes in stage combat, acting, theatre history, literature, and Shakespeare. She has been doing stage combat for over two decades, and teaching it for more than one. Recent favorite fight direction credits include Macbeth, The Play that Goes Wrong, 9 to 5, Mr. Burns’ Post-Electric Play, and Henry VI part ii. She has published articles and chapters on stage combat in such venues as The Fight Master, HowlRound, Sports Plays (Routledge, 2021), and Theatre Topics. In 2025, Danielle became the first fight director ever to have their work acknowledged by the Buffalo Toronto public media Artie awards with a nomination for outstanding technical element for her work on Dorian at the Irish Classical Theatre Company.
Danielle's work considers Shakespeare as cultural capital, particularly iterations that intersect with performance and theatrical labor. Her book Theatres of Value: Buying and Selling Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century New York City (SUNY Press, 2025) explores how nineteenth-century New York Theatre-makers bought and sold the commodity of Shakespeare, and how these performances of value intersect with American nation building and national identity. Her next project, Yassified Shakespeare (co-authored with Trevor Boffone), is a multimedia exploration of how iterations of Shakespearean performance and Shakespeare’s cultural capital critically intersect with drag and drag aesthetics. Her work has been seen in Theatre Topics, The Early Modern Studies Journal, Studies in Musical Theater, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Fight Master Magazine. She is the co-editor of Early Modern Liveness (Bloomsbury 2023), and Revenge is Mad Hard: Fat Ham and the Question of Cultural Reclamation (Palgrave, 2025).