Team Members
Project Director
Danielle Smotherman Bennett
Dr. Bennett brings a unique combination of first-hand experience with Athenian ceramics in the field and museum settings to the project along with her training in digital methodologies, such as photogrammetry, to this project. Dr. Bennett is the Curatorial Associate at the Menil Collection in Houston, TX, responsible for the research and care of the Ancient World collection. Previously, she was the inaugural Schuch Friends of Classics Post-Doctoral Fellow in Classics and Digital Humanities at San Diego State University (2018-2020). She received her BA in Art History and Archaeology in 2009 from the University of Missouri, Columbia and her MA (2011) and PhD (2017) in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College with a specialty in Athenian vase-painting. Dr. Bennett spent the 2014-2015 academic year in Greece completing dissertation research as an associate member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and returned in 2016 to act as the Field Director of the ASCSA excavations in Corinth. She has excavated multi-period sites in England, Turkey, Greece, and Italy ranging from the Bronze Age through Medieval periods, which provided many opportunities to work with archaeological materials first-hand. She gained experience with archaeological materials in museum collections at Bryn Mawr College, ancient Corinth, and the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens as well as additional first hand experience with objects in her current role. During her time working with the collections at Bryn Mawr College, she was trained in computational photography through Cultural Heritage Imaging, including receiving a certificate in the archival use of photogrammetry. She has applied computational photography in her archaeological field work at Vacone, Italy and Corinth, Greece. She hopes that Athena's Repository will enable greater access to fragmentary sherds for future researchers.