Jan Cohen-Cruz wrote Local Acts, Engaging Performance, and Remapping Performance, edited Radical Street Performance, and co-edited Playing Boal and A Boal Companion with Mady Schutzman. Jan's most recent book, a collaboration with Rad Pereira, is Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance 1965-2020 by Those Who Lived It.
She worked with A Blade of Grass, an organization that supports socially engaged artists, from 2013-2019, eventually serving as Director of Field Research and co-founding its magazine. From 2007–2012, she directed Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a consortium of colleges and universities committed to civic engagement, and co-founded its journal, Public. Cohen-Cruz earned her PhD at NYU Performance Studies and was a longtime professor in the Drama Department, initiating its minor in applied theater. In 2012, she received the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Award for Leadership in Community-Based Theatre and Civic Engagement. Jan was evaluator for the US State Department / Bronx Museum cultural diplomacy initiative smARTpower and for numerous initiatives of New York City Dept of Cultural Affairs’ Public Artists in Residence (PAIR) project. With Pam Korza, she researched and wrote a field guide for artist/municipal agency partnerships. She currently teaches at Touchstone Theatre/Moravian University and is part of their hands-on exploration into how theater can contribute to equitable housing on the local level.