Biography
Anita Gonzalez advocates for beautiful art crafted for social activism and consciousness raising. Current projects include public humanities research on Black Folkways, the opera Contested with composer Joel Thompson and Finding the Light with Jasmine Barnes. Anita is the new series editor for Cultural Histories of Theater and Performance with Bloomsbury Press and is actively seeking manuscripts for publication.
Mickey Dee and the Eclipse (2026) with composer Dave Ragland was commissioned by Washington National Opera for their American Opera Initiative. Gonzalez was a Fellow with American Opera Project’s Composers and Voice (2023-2025) and a winner of Opera America’s IDEA grant in 2023. Musicals: Kumanana (Gala Hispanic Theater), Ybor City (Latiné Musical Theater Lab), Zora on My Mind (The Woodshed), Ayanna Kelly. Plays& Librettos: Brathwaite’s Mecca (AOP), Forever Entwined (AOP) Faces in the Flames (Atlanta Opera and Opera America) Courthouse Bells (Boston Opera Collaborative), Finding the Light (Opera Ebony), Sunset Dreams (The Vagrancy), Home of My Ancestors (HGOCo).
Gonzalez is a Professor of Performing Arts and Black Studies at Georgetown University and Co-Founder of their Racial Justice Institute. She has edited and authored five books: Shipping Out: Race Performance and Labor at Sea (U Michigan), Performance, Dance and Political Economy (Bloomsbury), Black Performance Theory (Duke), Afro-Mexico: Dancing Between Myth and Reality (U-Texas), and Jarocho’s Soul (Rowan Littlefield). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and sits on the Board of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. Anita Gonzalez extends the reach of her scholarship through her massive open online courses Storytelling for Social Change and Black Performance as Social Protest.
Other published articles about performance histories and cultures are 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 recently led 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.
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.