The University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance announces that Paul Bonin-Rodriguez will join the Departments of Theatre & Drama and Entrepreneurship & Leadership as a professor in the winter of 2025. Bonin-Rodriguez, a performing artist, arts administrator, educator, and academic leader, brings extensive experience to the school.
Bonin-Rodriguez joins SMTD from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, where he earned numerous teaching awards and served as head of served as head of the Performance as Public Practice MA, MFA, and PhD area, as well as the graduate advisor and the associate chair for the Department of Theatre and Dance. At UT, he was also the founding chair of the undergraduate minor in arts management and administration for the College of Fine Arts.
“I am excited to join my colleagues in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance and the EXCEL Lab, who are advancing anti-racism and social justice through arts-based social work practice, arts leadership, and community engagement,” shared Bonin-Rodriguez. “The University of Michigan’s commitment to curriculum development focused on these efforts is timely and relevant to broader arts sector efforts focused on advancing cultural equity.”
Bonin-Rodriguez’s research analyzes systems of support and strategizes resources for cultural workers. His first book, Performing Policy: How Politics and Cultural Programs Redefined U.S. Artists for the Twenty-first Century (2015), assesses how arts policy research and development initiatives since the 1990s have radically reshaped artists’ practices nationwide. His forthcoming book, Groundwork: Race, Equity and the National Performance Network, assesses the emergence, development, and aspirations of a systems-based performance infrastructure first imagined in the late 1970s and brought to fruition in the mid-1980s.
Bonin-Rodriguez’s articles appear in Theatre Topics, Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts, Studies in Musical Theatre, Art Journal, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, and Text and Performance Quarterly. Book chapters appear in Applied Theatre: Economics; An Unimagined Space Beyond New WORLD Theater; The Next Act: Approaches to the Problems of Theatre Canons; Theatre, Performance and Theories of Change; and Arts and Cultural Management: Critical and Primary Sources. Vol. 1: Leadership and Governance.
“We are thrilled to welcome Paul Bonin-Rodriguez to SMTD as part of the provost’s Anti-Racism Hiring Initiative,” commented Jonathan Kuuskoski, associate professor and chair of the Department of Entrepreneurship & Leadership. “He has built a unique career as an internationally renowned scholar, pedagogue, performing artist, and arts advocate working at the critical intersection of public policy, performance practice, and artist networks. We are so excited for his arrival, which will diversify our training, research, and leadership resources for Michigan students and the field at large.”
Bonin-Rodriguez has served as the co-editor for Artivate and continues to serve on the editorial board. He is an editor for the series Arts in Context: Critical Performance Infrastructures for the University of Texas press. With Dr. Charlotte Canning, he was recently named a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant for a forthcoming two-day symposium and anthology titled “Building an Equitable Arts Infrastructure.” In addition to the National Endowment for the Humanities, his research has also been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.
“Paul Bonin-Rodriguez comes to SMTD with a renaissance career that exemplifies multihyphenate breadth,” said Tiffany Trent, chair and associate professor of the Department of Theatre & Drama. “His collaborative and integrative approaches to performance, policy, and scholarship will expand how students envision launching their futures in the arts and beyond.”
Before beginning his higher education career, Bonin-Rodriguez toured the US as a producing playwright, performer, and dancer, and he worked as an arts administrator for two decades. His plays have been published in The Color of Theater: Race, Culture, and Contemporary Performance, Jump-Start Playworks, and Text and Performance Quarterly. His poetry appears in I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You. He received a BA and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA from St. Mary’s University.