Alumni Highlights
April 2024 – Danielle Corsetto ’04
Danielle Corsetto ’04 is our April Alumni Highlight!
Danielle majored in photography and computer imagery at Shepherd. Though having grown up in rural Maryland, she originally had her heart set on going to a big art school in the city. “I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but I wouldn’t have survived the city,” she said. After figuring out what she really needed was a small town that had walkable access to nature, her parents suggested visiting Shepherd. They made the day trip back in 1999.
Having attended newly-built schools in Maryland, Danielle was endeared by the thought of so many before her being lectured to in the historical old halls – painting and sketching in the classrooms in the basement of Knutti. But, she was sold on Shepherd after realizing Shepherd’s affordability for out-of-state students.
Danielle is currently a cartoonist. Though her focus at Shepherd was photography, she wanted to be a cartoonist since she was eight years old. Being in school during the early 2000s, she was able to take a website production class that taught her HTML coding, a skill she was going to need if she wanted to build her own website one day. Right after graduation, she started a comic strip called Girls With Slingshots and built a simple website for it. She was updating the site with a new comic twice a week and it took off! Danielle was comfortable enough to quit her day job less than a year out of college and pursue comics and art full-time. As of March 2024, Danielle has been working for herself for 19 years.
In 2015, Girls With Slingshots received a Reuben award for Best Online Comic Strip. Danielle also wrote and illustrated The New Adventures of Bat Boy for the Weekly World News and three Adventure Time graphic novels for BOOM! Since then, she has begun production on a graphic novel called Elephant Town, which takes place in Shepherdstown, which she has called home for 25 years. It is expected to release it in 2026.
In addition, Danielle has written a sex education comic for teens called BOO! It’s Sex for WEBTOON with her friend Monica Gallagher. She has taught storytelling and illustration courses for The Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark, and at Shepherd. Danielle uses Patreon.com (@dcorsetto) as a means to provide people who enjoy her art with comics for a small monthly subscription. This has allowed her to keep the Elephant Town website ad-free and explore different media and approaches to share with her patrons.
Since the pandemic, Danielle has doubled down on her hobbies, including gardening. She uses repurposed materials to create garden elements like bamboo fencing, pallets, garden box fencing, and trash-bound items for trellising. She has joined the long-running Over The Mountain Studio Tour, which takes place the second weekend during November and includes over a dozen artists throughout Jefferson County.
The Shepherd University Alumni Association is thrilled to celebrate Danielle’s beautiful art and her many accomplishments. Shepherd Students Succeed!
Do You Know An Alumni Who Should Be Recognized?
Alumni Highlights Archive
FORMERLY KNOWN AS RAMS ACROSS AMERICA, a social media series featuring a new region of the United States each semester and highlighting alumni in each state. This program was replaced by ALUMNI HIGHLIGHTS, as seen above, in November 2020. See alumni highlighted prior to November 2020 from across the U.S. in the map below.