Danielle Ridolfi

Danielle Ridolfi is a picturebook author-illustrator with an MFA in Illustration and Visual Culture from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts. Her debut picture book, When the Dark Clouds Come, is forthcoming from Quill Tree Books in October 2025. Danielle writes and illustrates picture books for children about the natural world and our equally complex emotional landscape that encourage quiet observation, discovery, and reflection. She uses collage and printmaking in her work and is interested in the ways these methods can connect readers with tangible objects, memories, and places. You can often find pressed plants, photographs, and bits of ephemera in her work, and all of them have a story.

Danielle is also an instructor at Washington University in St. Louis where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses about picture book illustration and children’s publishing and often writes about children's illustration and visual culture. She was the 2024 recipient of the Ezra Jack Keats & Kerlan Memorial Fellowship from the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation. When she is not in the classroom or the studio, you can find Danielle browsing antique stores, rehabbing her 1902 Victorian home, quilting, or camping in the Missouri Ozarks. Danielle lives in Belleville, Illinois with her partner Eugene.