Dr. Michelle Cowin Gibbs
Dr. Michelle Cowin Gibbs is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and Co-Head of the Theatre Studies program at California State University Long Beach. Her scholarly research interests include a spectrum of interdisciplinary studies in critical identity and multidisciplinary scholarship in Black performativity, solo performance, dance, acting theory, and early twentieth-century Black theatre and performance.
Dr. Gibbs has publications in the Black Theatre Review; the Journal of American Drama and Theatre; Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies; and book chapters in Impacting Theatre Audiences: Methods for Studying Change (Routledge 2022) and Enveloping Worlds (The University of Michigan Press 2024). She has presented papers and performances at regional, national, and international conferences such as Performance Studies International (PSi), the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), Story Crossroads Annual Summit, History on Black Writing Black Book Interactive Project, and Mid-American Theatre Conference.
Most notably, Dr. Gibbs is a Zora Neale Hurston theatre studies scholar. Outside of recognizing Hurston's brilliance in crafting plays that highlight the resiliency of Southern Black folks of the early twentieth century, Dr. Gibbs examines Black womanhood across her body of theatrical work and makes connections among her anthropological and ethnographic research using play analysis and performance as a framework.
As a solo performance artist, Dr. Gibbs uses her body as a site for inquiry into how Black female racialization manifest into performances of affect - teetering between the spaces of tragic/comical and repulsive/alluring. Recent solo performance works include They Don’t Really Care About Us: PO-lice, PoPos, Sandra, and Me: a performance movement rumination about fear and terror, and toxic white masculine policing, as told through a reimagining of the last day of Sandra Bland’s life. A Thing Held in Full View is a commentary on race, gender, and women's reproductive rights in Texas. Blunt Force Trauma: A Mother's Performance in Empathy, a solo autoethnographic performance that explores the relationship among motherhood, cruelty, and forgiveness. Dancing with my/Self: The Selfie Monologues, is an exploration of Selfie culture that self-reflexively challenges how we attempt to hone-fetishize-dominate perceptions of self.
Dr. Gibbs is the managing editor for the Black Theatre Review, an academic journal of the Black Theatre Network. She serves as vice board chair of Brownbody, a performing arts company located in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received a Ph.D. in Theatre from Bowling Green State University. She holds an M.F.A. in Drama from the University of California, Irvine, and a BA in Theatre Performance from Western Michigan University. She is a proud member of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc. and The Honors Society of Phi Kappa Phi. www.michellecgibbs.com.
