Staff

Jan Cohen-Cruz

IA Engaged Arts Associate

Grounded in the resistant theater of the early 1970s, Jan Cohen-Cruz performed in street theater and co-facilitated a theater workshop in a maximum-security prison. She earned her PhD at NYU Performance Studies and then taught in the NYU Drama Department for 28 years, initiating the first minor in applied theater at a US university. In 2012, she received the Association for Theater in Higher Education’s Award for Leadership in Community-Based Theater and Civic Engagement. Jan wrote or edited eight books on socially-engaged performance, about subjects including street theater, Augusto Boal, and community-based theater. The most recent, See Me: Prison Theater Workshops and Love, a collaboration with formerly incarcerated participants and facilitators of prison theater workshops and a warden, will also become a podcast. Jan was director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, co-founding its journal, Public. She was director of field research for A Blade of Grass and and co-researched its field guide for artist/municipal agency partnerships. She was the evaluator for the US State Department/Bronx Museum cultural diplomacy initiative smARTpower and for seven NYC Department of Cultural Affairs’ Public Artists in Residence (PAIR) projects. Jan has led writing workshops at the Brooklyn Central Library and the Bethlehem Area Public Library and taught in Touchstone Theater’s Master’s in Performance Creation. She is currently co-editing a book with former IA associate director Kevin Bott tentatively entitled Revisiting Rites of Passage: Performance as Conduit for Change.

Contact Jan at  jcohencruz@gmail.com