AAUP Foundation Welcomes New Member to Board of Directors

By Edward J. Graham

The AAUP Foundation is pleased to welcome Robbie McCauley to its board of directors. McCauley has been an active presence in the American avant-garde theater for several decades and is a recent recipient of the Independent Reviewers of New England Award for Solo Performance. She was selected as a 2012 United States Artists Ford Foundation Fellow and has received an OBIE Award and a Bessie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Performance for her play Sally’s Rape. She is widely anthologized, including in Extreme Exposure, Moon Marked and Touched by Sun, and Performance and Cultural Politics, edited respectively by Jo Bonney, Sydne Mahone, and Elin Diamond.

One of the early cast members of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, McCauley went on to write and perform regularly in cities across the country and abroad. Striving to encourage dialogues on race between local whites and blacks, she created the Primary Sources series in Mississippi, Boston and Los Angeles produced by the Arts Company. In 1998, the Village Voice included her “Buffalo Project” as one of the “The 51 (or So) Greatest Avant-Garde Moments,” a list that included work by artists such as Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and John Cage.

McCauley recently retired from her professorship at Emerson College, and is now the 2014 Monan Professor in Theatre Arts at Boston College.