Dan Baron Cohen

Dan Baron Cohen (born 1957) is a playwright, community-theatre director, cultural theorist and arts-educator, presently living and working in Brazil.

Biography

Following undergraduate and post-graduate research into popular educational theatre at the University of Oxford, Dan Baron Cohen was apprenticed to the playwrights Edward Bond (England) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Kenya), whose life projects inspired a lasting search for methods of community-based cultural action for justice.

In 1998, 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 (IDEA) World Congress, Baron Cohen was reconfirmed as the President of IDEA. As the President of IDEA until July 2010, he 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 (Derry, 2001), Alfabetização Cultural: a luta íntima por uma nova humanidade (Cultural Literacy: the intimate struggle for a new humanity), São Paulo 2004, and numerous articles.

He is the cousin of well-known comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.

References

• Bailey, Dominic (14 April 2003). "Living with Brazil's landless". BBC NEWS. BBC. Retrieved 10 July 2010.