Meet Our Team

Dana Edell is Faculty Director of EmersonTHEATER and Assistant Professor of Performing Arts at Emerson College. As an activist-scholar-artist-educator she has produced and co-directed 80+ original plays and 7 albums of music written and performed by teenage girls and nonbinary youth addressing social justice issues.

Dana has worked as a theater teaching artist with people of all ages in public and private elementary, middle and high schools, adult prisons and youth correctional institutions in Rhode Island, California, Delaware and New York. She’s the co-director of SPARK Movement, an intergenerational, antiracist, arts-driven girls’ activist organization where she has trained and supported girls (ages 13–22) to design and run arts-based activist campaigns and take action in their communities.

Through her writing, presentations and media appearances, Dana advocates for the need for collaborative and activist performing arts experiences for girl-identified and gender expansive young people. She has published chapters and articles in more than a dozen academic books and journals, and her first book, Girls, Performance and Activism: Demanding to Be Heard was published by Routledge in 2022. She is the Co-Editor of Youth Theatre Journal. She has a BA in Ancient Greek from Brown University, an MFA in theatre directing from Columbia University and a PhD in theatre and education from NYU. At Emerson, she teaches Applied Theatre and Theatre Education.

Alayne Fiore oversees the College Pathway Programs as Executive Director of HIVE in the Social Justice Collaborative. She has been part of EmersonWRITES since 2016 through the EmersonPUBLISHES workshop and the editing and design of the annual EmersonWRITES anthology SPINE (Student Produced Interconnected Narratives at Emerson). Alayne has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Certificate in Literary Publishing. Her work has appeared in Gravel Magazine and ROAR, and published by Haunted Waters Press.

Crystal M. Gómez coordinates the College Pathway Programs as Program Manager for HIVE in the Social Justice Collaborative. Her role includes support and coordination of the college pathway programs. Crystal helps with recruitment, student engagement, professional development for EmersonWRITES Ambassadors, and lunch programming. Crystal has a MFA in Creative Writing (poetry) from Emerson College.