Profile

Danny M. Cohen, Ph. D. is a learning scientist, professor, writer, and musician.

AUTHOR
An author of human rights fiction, Danny's works include the choose-your-own-pathway mystery The 19th Window ​, the short story Dead Ends, and the historical novel Train, a Teacher Fellows selected text of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

EDUCATOR
A Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished Professor of Instruction at Northwestern University’s School of Education & Social Policy and The Crown Family Center for Jewish & Israel Studies, Danny teaches about the design of community programs for social change, collective memory, Holocaust fiction and film, education design, and marginalized narratives of human rights.
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DESIGNER
Danny is the Founder and Interim Executive Director of Unsilence, a national nonprofit that designs and delivers highly-interactive learning experiences that support young people and communities to have tough conversations about social injustice in the past and present. ​

SCHOLAR
Danny was an inaugural governor-appointed member of the Illinois Holocaust & Genocide Commission and, in 2020, was appointed by Governor Pritzker as co-chair. He was a member of the editorial advisory board of the journal The Holocaust in History & Memory, and he designed the pedagogical track of the inaugural docent training program of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center. Danny was a faculty fellow of the Auschwitz Jewish Center. His academic publications include Overlapping Triangles.

MUSICIAN & ARTIST
Danny is a selected artist for Brushes With Cancer, a program of Twist Out Cancer. He is also a singer-songwriter and a member of They Won't Win. Born and raised in London, Danny lives in Chicago with his husband and their daughter.

Photo courtesy of Northwestern University