Paul Bonin-Rodriguez

Paul Bonin-Rodriguez comes to the University of Michigan from The University of Texas at Austin, where he has served as Head of the Performance as Public Practice MA, MFA, and PhD area, as well as the Graduate Advisor (equivalent to Director of Graduate Studies) 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. At UT Austin, Dr. Bonin-Rodriguez held affiliations in Women’s and Gender Studies, LGBTQIA Studies, and Latin-American Studies. Dr. Bonin-Rodriguez’s research analyzes systems of support and strategizes for resources for cultural workers, with special emphases in race/ethinicity, gender, sexuality, and class. Much of his service supports that work. 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. In addition to his own publishing, Dr. Bonin-Rodriguez has served as the co-editor for Artivate: a Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts. Along with Charlotte Canning of UT Austin, Sarah Wilbur of Duke University, and Michael Cy Uy of UC Boulder, he serves as an editor for the recently named Arts in Context: Critical Performance Infrastructures series for UT Press, Prior to coming to the academy, Dr. Bonin-Rodriguez toured the U.S. as a producing playwright, performer, dancer and 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.