Proudly born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Danielle Elizabeth Stevens is an integrative health and wellness educator, writer, and multi-disciplinary artist working in service of social change globally. Her practice spans creative nonfiction and long-form literary work, performance and embodied arts, culinary practice, fashion and beauty, sensory and imagination-based modalities, and contemplative education. For nearly fifteen years, Danielle has designed healing spaces with marginalized and underserved communities, using evidence-based methods and artistic processes to support health outcomes, meaning-making, and collective care.
As an ancestral-led spiritual and cultural worker, Danielle’s work lives at the intersection of dismantling oppressive social structures and reimagining more humane ways of living, relating, and belonging. She treats imagination as both a neuroscientific and spiritual tool for liberation, and her work frequently engages ritual, storytelling, and shared sensory experience as methods for navigating impermanence, grief, and social transformation. Across disciplines, her practice centers the everyday artistry, dignity, and sacred humanity of those most impacted by structural violence.
Danielle has provided professional services including health, wellness, and healing justice capacity-building; strategic diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting; curriculum development and program design; empathy-based leadership training; and integrative arts curation and programming. Her work has taken place in over fifty cities across the United States and more than ten countries internationally, in collaboration with hundreds of community partners. She has worked with and learned from spiritual and religious leaders and medicine people globally, including monastics in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and indigenous curanderos near Ciudad de México.
She is trained in Mindful Self-Compassion, Anti-Oppression Facilitation, and Nonviolent Communication, and holds an advanced degree in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2009, she co-created UCSB’s first Women of Color sangha for BIPOC women, femmes, and non-binary people. Danielle is the Founding Director of Moonlight Wellness, a community-based organization specializing in high-impact healing justice programming for Black communities and QTPOC. She is also the Executive Director and Head Chef of the critically acclaimed #WeStillGottaEat Initiative, an international food justice project that combines culinary excellence, direct cash support, and community care to improve health and wellness outcomes for disadvantaged communities worldwide.
Danielle’s work and leadership have been featured in outlets including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times Magazine, CNN, The Laura Coates Show, and SiriusXM Satellite Radio. She is also the founder of This Bridge Called Our Health, a publication created to produce culture and critical discourse at the intersection of art, social justice, health, and healing.
She is currently based in Paris, where she is focused on writing, research, and the development of ongoing literary and artistic projects. She is working on her first long-form book project, Brutally Soft, a work of creative nonfiction that explores impermanence, healing, and collective becoming in times of social, political, and spiritual collapse. The book draws from lived experience, contemplative practice, cultural analysis, and frontline work in healing justice to examine how individuals and communities learn to soften without surrendering conviction, and how new ways of living can emerge from what is ending.