Dan Baron Cohen

Who is Dan Baron Cohen?

Dan Baron Cohen is a playwright, community-theatre director, cultural theorist and arts-educator, presently living and working in Brazil. Following undergraduate and post-graduate research into popular educational theatre at the University of Oxford, he was apprenticed to the playwrights Edward Bond and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o whose life projects inspired a lasting search for methods of community-based cultural action for justice.

In 1998, Dan Baron Cohen worked as a visiting professor at the State University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. His past nine years of collaborations with landless, indigenous, trade-union and university communities in Brazil, Peru, Chile and, more recently, in China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan, have advanced his methods into a pedagogy of intercultural literacy and a poetics of 'transformance'.

At the 2007 International Drama in Education and the Arts World Congress, Dan Baron Cohen was reconfirmed as the President of IDEA. As the President of the International Drama-Education Association until July 2010, Dan Baron Cohen was also Coordinator of the World Alliance for Arts Education, and was a member of the International Committee for the World Social Forum. He has published Theatre of Self-Determination, Alfabetização Cultural: a luta íntima por uma nova humanidade, São Paulo 2004, and numerous articles.