Dr. Anita Gonzalez is a professor of Black Studies and Performing Arts, and is co-founder and Research Professor of the Racial Justice Institute. She was recently Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and a Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan where she promoted interdisciplinary and intercultural performance initiatives. Her edited and authored books are Performance, Dance and Political Economy (Bloomsbury), Black Performance Theory (Duke), Afro-Mexico: Dancing Between Myth and Reality (U-Texas Press), and Jarocho’s Soul (Rowan Littlefield). She is a co-series editor for the Dance in Dialogue series at Bloomsbury Press. Her essays about multicultural and international performance appear in several edited collections including Black Acting Methods (Luckett), The Community Performance Reader (Kuppers), Festive Devils (Riggio, Segura, and Vignola) and the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre (George-Graves, 2015). She has published articles in the Radical History Review, Modern Drama, Performance Research International, and Dance Research Journal. She has completed three Senior Scholar Fulbright grants and has been a resident artist/scholar at Rockefeller’s Bellagio Center in Italy, and the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas. She was a Humanities Center Fellow at the University of Michigan during the 2017/18 academic year and is a recent recipient of the Shirley Verrett Award for outstanding teaching of performance.
Dr. Gonzalez extends the reach of her scholarship through public engagement. She created a massive open online course “Storytelling for Social Change” that has reached over 38,000 learners to date. A new open-access course, “Black Performance as Social Protest” is under development for the FutureLearn digital platform. Her interdisciplinary performance projects include projection mapping of The Snark and The Living Lakes in the Duderstadt Center, developing a performance installation and lecture series titled “Conjuring the Caribbean,” leading a team to develop the interactive historical website 19thCenturyActs, and founding Anishinaaabe Theatre Exchange in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to engage Ojibwe communities in dialogue through theatrical performance. Gonzalez also directs, devises and writes theatrical works. Her innovative stagings of historical and cross-cultural experiences have appeared on PBS national television and at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, The Working Theatre, Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, New York Live Arts, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and other national and international venues. Her short libretto Courthouse Bells will be produced by Boston Opera Collaborative in 2021-22. Other musical writings include Zora on My Mind about Black women’s empowerment and entrepreneurship and Ybor City the Musical about Cuban unionism and racial division in 1918. Gonzalez is a member of the National Theatre Conference, Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, League of Professional Women in Theatre, the Players Club NYC, and the Dramatists Guild.