Jan has facilitated theater workshops in prisons, psychiatric centers, migrant camps, inner cities, rural sites, schools, universities, libraries, centers for the elderly, etc. Her workshops are both stand-alone and a component of residencies also involving teaching, evaluation, and/or consultation. Her current workshop focus is the arts and life transitions. She continues to facilitate workshops foregrounding creative writing, theater of the oppressed, and other applied theater techniques. Examples of her workshops follow.

Writing

The Arts and Life Transitions,Greenwich House Center on the Square, New York City, 2024.

Remaking Home, Bethlehem Area Public Library (PA): 10-week workshop exploring home as a physical structure, place, person/s, nature, the body, and in relation to housing. 2022.

Creative Writing, Brooklyn Central Library: participant and substitute-facilitator for ongoing workshop. Participants write to a prompt offered by an experienced leader, share their work, and receive positive and supportive feedback. 2015-ongoing.

Theater

Theatre of the Oppressed workshops. Explorations of Augusto Boal’s theater-based techniques for diverse groups to collectively problem solve and support each other.

Community-based Theater story circles, devising, and game-based workshops for a range of groups including incarcerated persons, housing activists, community gardeners, students, the elderly, and others.

2025

February (online): Devising Theater Workshops Across Difference: Principles and Practices

Jan will lead an inquiry into generating theater workshops with people in circumstances very different from one’s own. She will address finding participants; selecting aims and methods that are of value to all concerned; avoiding appropriation; expanding participants’ theatrical horizons while following their lead; shaping session structures as a whole and individually; responding to changing desires; and providing a sense of accomplishment and closure. Her case study will be prison theater workshops, drawing examples from her recent book See Me: Prison Theater Workshops and Love. To register: https://cootieshots.org/master-classes/.

March/April: The Big Read: Saturday AMs: Writing the Stories We Need:

A Workshop Inspired by Rebekah Taussig’s Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Body

How does finding words for our life challenges hearten us and connect us to each other? What experiences that you know firsthand do you long to hear stories about? What could you write to be more seen for all you are? Spring-boarding from Rebekah Taussig’s memoir of her body, which, she writes, “looks and moves different from most,” participants will share and write about lived experiences that need to be more known in the world at large. This four- session workshop will take place mid-March to Mid-April at the Bethlehem Area Public Library and end with a sharing of what we have made. The workshop facilitator, Jan Cohen-Cruz, has written or edited eight non-fiction books. To know more, contact Jan at jcohencruz@gmail.com.

April 11/12 Moravian Writers’ Conference, Bethlehem, PA (free; registration required)

4/11 Craft Talk: Collaborative Writing Grounded in Workshops with People Inside & Outside of Prison Cohen-Cruz will share excerpts from her recent book See Me: Prison Theater Workshops and Love which features dialogues between people impacted together by prison theater workshops—incarcerated participants, facilitators, a warden, and returning citizens. She will discuss the value of getting multiple perspectives on the same experience and share techniques for making the texts as vivid as the people writing them whether experienced writers or not. She will address the necessity of getting to know people in circumstances very different from one’s own not only to burst misconceptions about that particular group but by extension, to recognize that the people in any circumstance are diverse among themselves. Participants will pair up and exchange a story evoked by the readings from the book as a first step to grounding an exchange in even a very small shared experience.

4/12: Workshop:  Writing Dialogically: Expanding Insights through Writing Exchanges Across Difference Using her recent book See Me: Prison Theater Workshops and Love as a springboard, Cohen-Cruz will share examples of insights generated in that text through two or three people responding to each other’s writing, interviewing each other, recording and editing conversations, and collaboratively creating theater together. In pairs or trios, workshop participants first identify an engaging subject around which each has a different experience. The pairs will then try various modes of writing together to share their own perception and reflect on their partner’s. We’ll discuss underlying principles for engaging in such exchange such as: making sure the subject and form are meaningful to all involved; establishing a relationship as the grounds for deep exchange; understanding what constitutes appropriation; and the recognizing importance of self-representation.

Project Evaluation

Jan is available to evaluate socially engaged art projects and programs.

Approach to Evaluating Socially Engaged Arts Projects

1) Ethnographic: spends time with the artists and participants as a project unfolds so that the evaluation reflects steps along the way, not just a final event;

2) Multi-vocal: Input comes from stakeholders from different positions within the project including participants, the initiating artist, partnering artists, host institutions, funders, and others depending on the specific situation;

3) As an advocate: Jan is committed to art integrated into other social endeavors and recognizes the challenges involved. She approaches her task from the point of view of what is working, what could work, and what can be learned from components that are not bearing fruit.

Examples of Evaluation Contexts

2011-12 Evaluator for US State Department of smARTpower, designed by Bronx Museum. 15 socially-engaged US visual artists, each in a different country, partnering with local artists and residents around a meaningful social issue.

2014-2019 Director of Field Research, A Blade of Grass, focused on following, engaging with, and writing about up to eight artist-fellows per year

2015-2018 Evaluator of seven New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Public Artists in Residence (PAIR) projects, each embedded in a city agency for one-year terms. Included Veterans Affairs, the Mayor’s Office of Immigration Services, Administration of Children and Families, Probation, Domestic Violence, Corrections, and Human Rights.