Danielle is a mostly self-taught wood sculptor and carver from Bar Harbor, Maine. She blends traditional and modern methods with ample experimentation to make sculptural and functional pieces.

She graduated in 2005 from College of the Atlantic, where she explored music and sound sculpture. While building her senior project, a handmade fiddle-ish instrument constructed from burn pile wood found on campus, she carved her first spoon.

For the following 15 years she worked in restaurants, in gardens and a local farm, managed a sled dog kennel and paid off student loans, all the while carrying around a cardboard box full of random woodworking tools, knowing they were important, but uncertain of where they fit in.

Chronic illness has shaped much of their practice and techniques, encouraging them to develop hybrid (power carving and hand carving) methods that allow them to push the boundaries of vessel and abstract forms while also honoring the limits of their body. This circumstance has presented a platform from which to envision a new way of thinking about how our bodies relate to production and value.

They often use carved texture as a visual history of the force needed to create each piece, a reference to their own complex relationship to a process that is challenging for their body. Their work often starts with whole logs, a nod to their upbringing in a scrappy rural western Maine paper mill town where they marveled over truck after truck of logs being roughly processed in the open yards. Compelled by the material, its availability, and contributing to the reclamation process, they utilize experimental techniques alongside tenets of traditional Scandinavian sloyd work.

She has written for Fine Woodworking, Mortise & Tenon Magazine, Popular Woodworking, and from 2014-17 was a member of Lie-Nielsen Toolworks hand tool events, traveling the country teaching hand tool woodworking fundamentals.

She was awarded the Belvedere Handcraft Fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission in 2018, was co-Best in Show at the 2024 Maine Wood Biennial, and has received a number of grants to support her work. She has taught workshops on her bowl carving methods all across the country and far flung parts of the world. Her first book, The Handcarved Bowl, was published in 2021.