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Robin Mello

  • Professor, Theatre
  • Teaching Fellow, Lubar Entrepreneurship Center

Education

  • PhD Interdisciplinary Studies, Storytelling & Human Development, Lesley University
  • Special Graduate Student Studies, Folklore, Harvard University
  • MS Educational Psychology, Exceptional Education & Arts-based Learning, University of New York at Albany
  • BFA Theatre, Acting, Purchase College

Biography

Dr. Robin Mello is a Professor of Theatre and '25-'26 Innovation Fellow at the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center. Her career in performance, storytelling, and arts education has spanned many decades and current practice focuses on promoting imaginative and playful ways to support community collaboration  and networking. In her present role as Innovation Fellow, for example, she is developing a working group called Playful Academics.

Robin began her career at UWM as the founding Director of Theatre's thriving K – 12 Theatre Education Program. She now instructs in all programs as a dramaturg, stage-intimacy choreographer, storyteller, theatre historian, and director. In addition to her activities at UWM, Robin collaborates with the Innoplay Studio, University of Exeter Business School in the UK. You can read more about her work with Innoplay in the Professors at Play Online Playbook.

In Summer 2026 Dr. Mello will be a keynote speaker at the Playposium International Conference 2026 in Exeter where, among other things, she will focus on storytelling and its role in building community and collaborate with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Chris Jeansonne, on the 200 Year Old Vampire Banquet (working title) role-play event. June 2026 Mello will also lead storytelling and leadership development sessions at Exeter University during the pre-conference-week.

In 2025 Robin directed UWM's sold-out production of The Ballad of Maria Marten. Listen to the interview with UWM student Assistant Directors Lizzie Riley and Ambrose Schulte. Other past theatre programming includes The Welcome Table! with Black Arts, MKE, Odyssey in the Sky with the UWM Planetarium, Women’s Voices/Women’s Work with the Wisconsin Speakers’ Bureau, Spinning Tales with Wisconsin Arts, Cinderella 30,000, A Cosmic Web, and Orphan Train(a devised piece about the Orphan Train Movement, 1853-1929). Listen to the WUWM Interview: Orphan Train.

Robin contributed her dynamic approach and research knowledge about hero and heroine mythologies to the Penelope Project, (directed and written by MacArthur Fellow Dr. Anne Basting). Robin’s multiple contributions were as an actor (The Nurse), supervisor of student interns, devisor and company member, dramaturge, and program evaluator. Mello details these experiences in The Penelope Project: An Arts-Based Odyssey.

Mello’s multiple work in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) include Tale of Scale, Sharing Wisconsin the Sky: Indigenous Voices, and Star Stories—Communicating the Universe. All are projects conducted with collaborator Dr. Jean Creighton, Director of the UWM Planetarium.

Throughout her dynamic career Mello’s work has been supported by numerous grants, foundations and commissions including ArtsEco, CAMPAC, Carnegie Foundation’s Teachers for a New Era, Ezra J. Keats Foundation, First Night Boston, International Reading Association, Little Red Schoolhouse Project, NASA’s Wisconsin Space Science Consortium, National Storytelling Network, National Women’s Hall of Fame, New England New Vaudeville Festival, New England Touring Artists Program, Maine Touring Artists Program, Maine Quilters Guild, Phish (the band), St. John's Arts Fund, US State Department, UWM Office of Research & Sponsored Programs, UWM Innovation Center, University System of Wisconsin, Very Special Arts, Americans for the Arts, Wisconsin Arts Speakers Bureau, and the Wisconsin Humanities Council.

Links

Recent Works

A group of students posing in front of the doors to a theater.
Stage scene with one performer holding a large patterned quilt in the foreground while three costumed performers sit behind on chairs.
Two people next to each other on a dark stage, holding scripts.
Person in a teal shirt leans against stacked suitcases on a rolling crate while others sit and stand in a studio space.
Women dance on stage in historical clothing.

Articles & Selected Papers

  • Koeners, M., Mello, R., & Lusby, A. (2025). Elyse’s Quest. In S. Brown, G. Ware, & L. Forbes, Eds., Professors at Play Online Playbook. National Institute for Play, Carmel, CA.
  • Creighton, J. & Mello, R. (March 2021). Tale of scale: Infusing astronomical concepts into an undergraduate storytelling course. The Planetarium, 50(1), 12-18.

Books

Basting, Towey, & Rose, Eds. (2016). The Penelope Project: An Arts-based Odyssey to Change Elder Care. Teaching Humanities and Public Life Series, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Notable

Featured 2026 Keynote at Playposium International Conference.