35: Meeting the Moment: How 67 Activist Artists Changed the Story of American Theater

Jan Cohen-Cruz has given a lot to the field of arts-based community development. By that, I mean that there's a significant body of academic and community-based artwork, scholarship, teaching, and organizing that are absolutely covered with her fingerprints.BIOJan Cohen-Cruz was the founding editor of Public: A Journal of Imagining America. She directed Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (2007-12), and for 28 years before that, was a professor at NYU, directing a minor in applied theatre and initiating socially-engaged projects and courses. She wrote Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response and Local Acts: Community‑Based Performance in the US. She edited Radical Street Performance and co‑edited Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism and A Boal Companion. Jan was also a University Professor at Syracuse University. In 2012, she received the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Award for Leadership in Community-Based Theatre and Civic Engagement. Here latest book, Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Theater, 1965 To 2020 written with Rad Pereira will published by New Village Press in May 2022. Notable Mentions (in order of appearance)Augusto Boal, was a Brazilian theatre practitioner, drama theorist, and political activist. He was the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, a theatrical form originally used in radical left popular education movements. Boal served one term as a Vereador (the Brazilian equivalent of a city councillor) in Rio de Janeiro from 1993 to 1997, where he developed legislative theatre.[1]Imagining America: “The Imagining America consortium (IA) brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. Working across institutional, disciplinary, and community divides, IA strengthens and promotes public scholarship, cultural organizing, and campus change that inspires collective imagination, knowledge-making, and civic action on pressing public issues.”Public: “Public is a peer-reviewed, multimedia e-journal focused on humanities, arts, and design in public life. It aspires to connect what we can imagine with what we can do. We are interested in projects, pedagogies, resources, and ideas that reflect rich engagements among diverse participants, organizations, disciplines, and sectors.”

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