Anita Gonzalez (Ph.D.) is a professor of performing arts and African American studies at Georgetown University and a co-Founder of their Racial Justice Institute. She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her edited and authored books are Shipping Out: Race, Performance and Labor at Sea (U-Michigan Press), 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). Her essays about multi-cultural 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 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.
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 50,000 learners to date. A new open access course, “Black Performance as Social Protest” is available on the FutureLearn digital platform. Her interdisciplinary initiatives 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. Gonzalez writes operas and musicals. Her librettos have been produced by Atlanta Opera (Faces in the Flames, 2023) and Boston Opera Collaborative (Courthouse Bells 2023). 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 Fellow in the American Opera Project's Composers and the Voice program, a member of the National Theatre Conference, Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, and the Dramatists Guild.