Dani Hawkins

Dani is a Philadelphia-based cellist, teacher, and scholar who’s played with the Richardson Chamber Players, Delaware Symphony Orchestra, Boston Philharmonic, and various other ensembles and contradance bands. In 2012, they released “Ride EP,” a DVD of original multimedia art based on footage and field recordings taken while living out of a van. The debut album for their current project Midnight on the Water (midnightonthewater.com) is forthcoming in Spring 2026.

In addition to teaching at Maine Fiddle Camp since 2011, Dani has taught cello at Cornell University, the Ashokan Center, Open Access to Music Education, Folk College, Pennsylvania Folk Gathering, and Fiddle Hell. They endeavor to make their cello teaching as accessible as possible and to emphasize the participatory nature of roots traditions.

Dani received their PhD in Musicology with concentrations in Ethnomusicology and American Studies from Cornell University in 2023. Research at New England fiddle camps contributed substantially to both their dissertation, Listening Beyond Modernity: Race, Radicalism, and Folklife, which won the 2024 Donald J. Grout Memorial Prize, and also to a paper titled “Writing Music / Writing Movements,” which was awarded the 2023 Pantaleoni Prize by the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology. They’ve conducted other fieldwork in Ghana, China’s Hunan province, Brooklyn, Wet’suwet’en territory, Philadelphia, and presented the resulting scholarship at the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Studies Association, the Royal Society of Canada, the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance, and the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. They’ve taught both conventional undergraduate music classes as well as original interdisciplinary seminars like “The Politics of Listening: Sound and Civic Life” and “Music in the Making and Unmaking of Race” at Memorial of University of Newfoundland, Cornell University, and Swarthmore College.

They enjoy bodysurfing, being a part of Philadelphia’s blooming mutual aid networks, and eating hot wings.

You can visit him on the web here.