Michelle Cowin Gibbs, Ph.D., M.F.A.
Michelle Cowin Gibbs, Ph.D., M.F.A.
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Dr. Michelle Cowin Gibbs teaches a wide variety of courses in the Department of Theatre Arts, including theatre history, theatre studies, and performance courses at California State University Long Beach. Her scholarly research interests include a spectrum of interdisciplinary studies situated in Black performativity and critical identity studies, including solo autoethnographic performance and early twentieth-century Black theatre and performance. Michelle has publications in the Black Theatre Review; the Journal of American Drama and Theatre; Detroit Dance Research, Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies; and book chapters in Impacting Theatre Audiences: Methods for Studying Change (Routledge, 2022), Enveloping Worlds (2025), and Hurston in Context (Routledge, 2025). She has presented papers, performances, and served on panels at conferences including the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), the Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC), Zora! Festival, the Annual Zora Neale Hurston Conference, and the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR).
Most notably, Dr. Gibbs is a Zora Neale Hurston theatre studies scholar. She examines Black womanhood across Hurston’s body of theatrical work and makes connections among Hurston's anthropological and ethnographic research with play analysis. Dr. Gibbs is developing a digital humanities website devoted to Hurston and Theatre Studies, forthcoming in 2026. She is a fellow with the History of Black Writing Program at the University of Kansas's Black Book Interactive Project—with AFRO-PWW and IOPN publishing group.
Dr. Gibbs is currently working on a landmark book project that brings together a collection of critical essays that examine and analyze Zora Neale Hurston's theatre works. This collection will explore several important ways that scholars, practitioners, and creative artists traverse Hurston’s theatrical works and presence to uncover her theories, pedagogies, methodologies, and creative practices that enlivened and strengthened Hurston's lifelong connection to theatre and theatrical practice.
As a solo autoethnographic performance artist, Dr. Gibbs uses her body as a site for inquiry into how Black female racialization manifests 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 between 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 (tBTR), a peer-reviewed academic journal of the Black Theatre Network. tBTR is hosted by the University of Arizona Libraries. She serves on the academics committee for Zora! Festival in Eatonville, Florida. She is the vice chair of Brownbody, a performing arts company located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Using a blend of African diasporic perspectives in modern dance, theatre, and figure skating, Brownbody seeks to build artistic experiences that disrupt biased narratives.
Dr. Gibbs received a Ph.D. in Theatre and a graduate certificate in Performance Studies from Bowling Green State University. She holds an M.F.A. in Drama from the University of California, Irvine, and a B.A. in Theatre Performance from Western Michigan University.
She is a proud member of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michelle-Cowin-Gibbs
Most notably, Dr. Gibbs is a Zora Neale Hurston theatre studies scholar. She examines Black womanhood across Hurston’s body of theatrical work and makes connections among Hurston's anthropological and ethnographic research with play analysis. Dr. Gibbs is developing a digital humanities website devoted to Hurston and Theatre Studies, forthcoming in 2026. She is a fellow with the History of Black Writing Program at the University of Kansas's Black Book Interactive Project—with AFRO-PWW and IOPN publishing group.
Dr. Gibbs is currently working on a landmark book project that brings together a collection of critical essays that examine and analyze Zora Neale Hurston's theatre works. This collection will explore several important ways that scholars, practitioners, and creative artists traverse Hurston’s theatrical works and presence to uncover her theories, pedagogies, methodologies, and creative practices that enlivened and strengthened Hurston's lifelong connection to theatre and theatrical practice.
As a solo autoethnographic performance artist, Dr. Gibbs uses her body as a site for inquiry into how Black female racialization manifests 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 between 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 (tBTR), a peer-reviewed academic journal of the Black Theatre Network. tBTR is hosted by the University of Arizona Libraries. She serves on the academics committee for Zora! Festival in Eatonville, Florida. She is the vice chair of Brownbody, a performing arts company located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Using a blend of African diasporic perspectives in modern dance, theatre, and figure skating, Brownbody seeks to build artistic experiences that disrupt biased narratives.
Dr. Gibbs received a Ph.D. in Theatre and a graduate certificate in Performance Studies from Bowling Green State University. She holds an M.F.A. in Drama from the University of California, Irvine, and a B.A. in Theatre Performance from Western Michigan University.
She is a proud member of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michelle-Cowin-Gibbs
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