Dan Baron Cohen

Daniel Baron Cohen (born 8 May 1957) is a British playwright, community-theatre director, cultural theorist and arts-educator, presently living and working in Brazil.

[1] 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.

His past 21 years of collaborations with landless, indigenous, trade-union, university, and indigenous communities in Brazil, Peru, Chile[2] in China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and since 2008, with an Afro-Indigenous community in the south-eastern region of the Amazonian state of Pará, have advanced his methods into a pedagogy of intercultural literacy and a poetics of "transformance".

Since 2008, following national awards from the Ministries of Culture and of Education, and from UNICEF and UNESCO in Brazil, Baron Cohen has been living and working in Cabelo Seco, founding afro-indigenous community of Marabá City, developing the paradigm project Rios de Encontro (Rivers of Meeting).

Dan Baron Cohen has published Theatre of Self-Determination (Derry, 2001), (ISBN 978-0946451623), Alfabetização Cultural: a luta íntima por uma nova humanidade (Cultural Literacy: the intimate struggle for a new humanity), São Paulo 2004, (ISBN 978-8589147026), Colheita em Tempos de Seca: cultivando pedagogias de vida por comunidades sustentáveis (Harvest in Times of Drought: cultivating pedagogies of life for sustainable communities), Marabá 2011, (ISBN 978-85-65067-00-3), chapters for Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan and IDEA publications, and numerous articles, most recently for New Internationalist magazine.