Danielle Sekel is the Outreach and Programming Coordinator at the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is also a Ph.D. student in musicology at Illinois. She arrived at Illinois in 2017 to pursue a master’s degree in musicology, focusing her research on Bosnian hip hop as an oral tradition and the intergenerational, mass-mediated discourse of hip hop artists in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. In her doctoral research, Danielle explores the intersections of industrial and ethnic heritage within the music of Slavic-American communities in the (post-)industrial anthracite coal mining region of Northeast Pennsylvania. At Illinois, she has furthered her studies in advanced Bosnian and Bulgarian, supported by Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships through REEEC and the European Union Center.

Before coming to Illinois, she was a middle and high school music and literature teacher in South Carolina and has developed curriculum for and taught at K-12 summer programs at the American University in Bulgaria and Wyoming Seminary College Preparatory School (Pennsylvania). At UIUC, she has been a teaching assistant for MUS 110: Introduction to Art Music: International Perspectives and MUS 133: Introduction to World Music.