ABOUT

Jan Cohen-Cruz wrote Local Acts, Engaging Performance, and Remapping Performance; edited Radical Street Performance; coedited Playing Boal and A Boal Companion with Mady Schutzman; and with Rad Pereira, co-authored Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance, 1965-2020, by Those Who Lived It. She worked with A Blade of Grass (2013-2019), supporting socially engaged artists as director of field research and cofounder of its magazine. She directed Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (2007-2012), a consortium of colleges and universities committed to civic engagement, and cofounded its journal, Public. Cohen-Cruz earned her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University and was a professor in the Drama Department, initiating its minor in Applied Theatre. In 2012, she received the Association for Theatre in Higher Education s Award for Leadership in Community-Based Theatre and Civic Engagement. Jan was an evaluator for the U.S. State Department/Bronx Museum cultural diplomacy initiative smARTpower and for New York City s Public Artists in Residence. She and Pam Korza developed a field guide for artist/municipal agency partnerships. Jan teaches at Touchstone Theatre/Moravian University and, with her family, operates the Smokehouse Food Truck in eastern Pennsylvania.