Episode 35: Jan Cohen Cruz - Meeting the Moment

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 their fingerprints. BIOJan Cohen-Cruz was the founding editor of http://public.imaginingamerica.org/ (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 is 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, https://nyupress.org/9781613321546/meeting-the-moment/ (Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Theater, 1965 To 2020) written with https://nyupress.org/author/rad-pereira (Rad Pereira) will published by https://www.newvillagepress.org/about-us/mission-statement/ (New Village Press )in May 2022. Notable Mentions (in order of appearance)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Boal (Augusto Boal,) was a Brazilian theatre practitioner, drama theorist, and political activist. He was the founder of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_the_Oppressed (Theatre of the Oppressed), a theatrical form originally used in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Party_of_the_Left (radical left) popular education movements. Boal served one term as a Vereador (the Brazilian equivalent of a city councillor) in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_de_Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro) from 1993 to 1997, where he developed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_t