Biography

Anita Gonzalez believes the art of storytelling connects people to their cultures. This Georgetown University faculty member extends the reach of her scholarship through public engagement. Her massive open online courses Storytelling for Social Change and Black Performance as Social Protest have reached over 50,000 learners to date. As a co-Founder/Leader of Georgetown’s Racial Justice Institute, Gonzalez contributes to projects which foreground experiences and histories of the under-represented. Her essays advocate for informed cultural exchange across domestic and international settings. Most recently (2023), she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Gonzalez, a scholar of Performing Arts and African American Studies, has published articles about performance histories and cultures in the Radical History Review, Modern Drama, Theatre Research International, and Dance Research Journal. She has edited and authored four books: 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). Additional essays about intercultural performance appear in the edited collections African Performance Arts and Political Acts, Black Acting Methods, Narratives in Black British Dance, The Community Performance Reade, and the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre.

Gonzalez is currently leads  the Woodshed Center at Georgetown University. She was previously an Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and a Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan where she promoted interdisciplinary performance initiatives including Conjuring the Caribbean, a research/residency/installation, and the Anishinaabe Theatre Exchange, a storytelling incubator for Native American artists. Her theatre practice includes developing theatrical works focused on telling women’s stories and histories. She is a producer/director/librettist who encourages artists to develop beautiful art crafted for social activism and consciousness raising.

Recent works include the musical revue Kumanana for the Gala Hispanic Theater about Afro-Peruvian activists Nicomedes and Victoria Santa Cruz, commission with the American Opera Initiative at Washington National Opera,  Faces in the Flames for Atlanta Opera’s 96 Hour Opera Festival which received an Opera America IDEA award,  the libretto Courthouse Bells about voting rights produced by Boston Opera Collaborative (2023), Zora on My Mind about Black women’s empowerment and Ybor City the Musical about Afro-Cuban cigar rollers in Tampa, Fl. Dr. Gonzalez (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin) is a member of the American Opera Project’s Fellowship Program, the National Theatre Conference, the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, the American Society for Theatre Research and co-series editor of the Women’s Innovations in Theater Dance and Performance: Leaders volume  for Bloomsbury Press.

Artist Statement

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is the ability to continuously create new worlds and experience new perspectives about the world and people who occupy it.

The mission that drives my work is a profound belief that the arts, especially the performing arts, are a way of bringing cultures and communities together for a common purpose. If you ask someone why they come to theater or performing arts, they always mention the community and the opportunity arts create for people to come together around a common story (or idea) that all have agreed to work on. This is my passion. Stories capture histories of the under-represented and they manifest in all types of media. I am also driven by the belief that a story can and should be told in multiple ways – dance, film, stage, etc.- to reach the broadest audience.

I am a storyteller and I express my storytelling in several formats. I teach students, I write musical and opera librettos and I write books about global Black experiences. I came to this journey through early performances (I was 9 years old when I performed in my first musical) and through my work as a founding member of the Urban Bush Women. Through dance, I came to understand that most cultures tell their stories through – text, sound, movement and symbolic visuals. For me, opera is the largest representation of this multi-disciplinary storytelling, but we also see it in spoken word, festivals performances and music concerts.

I was born in New Jersey from parents that came from the Caribbean (Bahamas and Cuba) and the American South (South Carolina). I am proud of many things – my books Afro-Mexico, Black Performance Theory and Shipping Out; my musicals Ybor City and Zora on My Mind, and my operas Faces in the Flames and Finding the Light.