Jan Cohen-Cruz
Jan Cohen-Cruz is a scholar and practitioner of activist and community-based performance. She is currently Director of Imagining America, a national consortium of colleges and universities working to strengthen democratic public participation in the humanities, arts and design. Jan is also a university professor at Syracuse University, where Imagining America is housed. Most recently she was a Professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Drama Department, where she directed the Office of Community Connections. She participated in the founding of the Center for Art and Public Policy at NYU and has taught and/or directed in prisons, colleges, psychiatric facilities, migrant camps, theatres, schools, senior centers and parks.
Grounded in the resistant theatre of the late 60s, early 70s, she was a member of the NYC Street Theatre/Jonah Project, and has been a freelance practitioner of the techniques of Augusto Boal since bringing him to the U.S. in 1989. Eclectic in her application of the arts to social situations, she is also versed in techniques grounded in storytelling and in the adaptation of existing texts. From 1995-97, she co-directed the Tisch School of the Arts' AmeriCorps project, focusing on violence reduction through the arts.
Jan co-edited Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism (1994) and A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics (2006), with Mady Schutzman; edited Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology (1998); and wrote Local Acts: Community-based Performance in the United States (2005). Her essays have appeared in numerous national publications.