Michelle Robinson: 2025 William & Sara McCoy Performing Arts Leadership Award Recipient

by Lauren Wingenroth

Michelle Robinson’s American Studies syllabi tend to be alive and embodied.

There was the time that Martha Graham Dance Company artistic director, Janet Eilber, helped students explore fragility in the body as they studied the AIDS epidemic. Or, when a gospel choir visiting with jazz trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis, came to talk to students in Robinson’s class on radical religious communities and gave an impromptu performance.

Robinson’s expansive engagement with the performing arts and her innovative, energetic collaborations with CPA staff and artists have earned her this year’s prestigious William & Sara McCoy Performing Arts Leadership Award, given annually to a UNC-Chapel Hill employee who embodies the values of artistic excellence, educational innovation, and community engagement. The award is named in memory of the McCoys, who embodied these values deeply: William (Bill), former Vice Chancellor of Finance for the UNC System and the Interim Chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill, helped shape the university’s strategic direction, and Sara was a dedicated steward of the arts at Carolina, serving on nine campus boards and committees.

Robinson’s own research bridges literature, pop culture, and religion: Her first book explored detective fiction, and her current project is on the evangelist Billy Graham. But in the classroom, you’ll find her teaching on everything from stand-up comedy to LGBTQ fiction to American cinema. Whatever the subject matter, Robinson is always eager to find ways that the performing arts can deepen her students’ engagement—and sometimes even push her syllabi in new directions.

“When I find out what’s going to be on the CPA program for the year, I really let my imagination go,” she says. “What do I want to experiment with? What am I willing to try? What will be most transformative for my students?”

As a result of Robinson’s bold, creative approach to integrating the performing arts into her teaching, her classroom has become a regular stop for some of our country’s most influential and celebrated artists as they visit CPA, from renowned postmodern choreographer, Lucinda Childs, to visionary musician and composer, Toshi Reagon. Robinson’s students often attend CPA shows as part of a class or on their own. “I went to Boston University, and I could never afford to go to shows,” she says. When she arrived in Chapel Hill, former chair of the American Studies department Joy Kasson introduced her to CPA and showed her the possibilities for getting involved. “To come to a place where it’s affordable? I tell students about it all the time—just go try something,” says Robinson.

Robinson’s open-minded, energetic attitude towards the arts seems to be contagious. When artists from experimental German theater group Rimini Protokoll visited her class, several students were so enthralled that they were recruited to perform in the troupe’s 100% The Triangle at CPA, which had an all-local cast. Inspired by the show, which used demographic statistics to explore questions around community and place, Robinson also had her class perform their own investigations into the demographics of their social circles. “Students asked each other really interesting questions, about who is afraid to walk on campus at night, or how much student debt they have,” says Robinson.

“It reframed their networks and helped them understand who they were building a community with and who they were not building a community with.”

Robinson is already dreaming about next semester’s CPA lineup, and the connections she’ll make in her classes. One performance she’s particularly excited about: the return of Culture Mill’s Eclipse, a participatory work about power and public space. She hopes she can get the entirety of her 150-person lecture class to experience the performance-based social practice at the Old Well accompanying the work*. “That’s my dream, to have 150 people out there, having a super sensory, full-body experience of a space they walk through every day and don’t think about,” she says. It won’t be her first time engaging with Eclipse. In her role on the Graduate Studies Committee, she organized an orientation for Teaching Assistants in which they used Eclipse as a framework to talk about the complex histories of many spaces on campus and what that means for undergraduates trying to make a home and a community.

Receiving the William & Sara McCoy Performing Arts Leadership Award has only deepened Robinson’s already-staunch commitment to sharing the performing arts with her students. “It feels like an aspirational award,” she says. “It makes me want to do so much more.”

*More information about free events associated with Culture Mill’s Eclipse performances will be available in January on the Free Events page at www.carolinaperformingarts.org.