Danielle Hanzalik

Danielle Hanzalik is a Ph.D. candidate the French and Francophone Studies section of ELTS. She received her B.A. in French and English from UC Berkeley where she was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society in her third year. After completing her undergraduate degree, she spent three years living in France, first teaching English with TAPIF and later mentoring college students. At UCLA her dissertation explores how graffiti is represented as a practice of resistance against state violence in French literature, film, and visual art of the late 20^thcentury. By examining three paradigms of graffiti—its material, textual and spatial nature—her work exposes the connection between the physical bodies that encounter Parisian urban writings and the greater political body as it encounters moments of revolution, such as that of May 1968 and the Algerian War.

She was part of the 2021-22 Urban Humanities Initiative cohort at UCLA through cityLab and was a co-editor and curator of Season 3 of the Urban Humanities Digital Salon podcast released in February 2024.