Dajonea Robinson is a second-year doctoral student in the College of Arts and Media at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her research interests focus on Black horror and Afrofuturism and how they intersect with intergenerational trauma, resilience, and identity as a form of resistance. Her research connects with larger discourses on the erasure of marginalized voices. Robinson became the first African American Editor-in-Chief for the Lumberjack Newspaper at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt (HSU) during the paper's 90th anniversary. She graduated from HSU with a bachelor's degree in journalism. She obtained an MFA degree in creative writing at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. This has allowed Robinson to explore diverse modes of storytelling styles.
As a multimodal storyteller, Robinson has guest lectured for an Artificial Intelligence: Cloud and Edge Implementations course at the University of Oxford in England. She was a narrative designer for gamification projects with the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in Springfield, Illinois. She spearheaded her Southern Illinois Sundown Towns project as a lead narrative designer that created a modern-day immersive virtual reality look at the past terrors of sundown towns and how they affected the Black diaspora in Illinois. She has served as a co-director for the Saluki Student Success Initiative where she created and executed a curriculum aimed at combating English composition course failure rates and increasing retention among at-risk students in these courses. In 2025 Robinson also served as the director of the Big Muddy Film Festival, located in Carbondale Illinois. She is also an oral history interviewer for Cairo’s African American Heritage Trail. Robinson has published in Medical Science Educator (2024) and her team presented and published in the Electronic Visualization & the Arts Conference London England (2023). When she is not working on projects, you can find her writing novels, screenwriting, filmmaking, or loving on her elderly mother and two cats.