About Cristina A. Bejan Author / Artist
Born in Colorado at the height of the Cold War, CRISTINA A. BEJAN is a dual-citizen of Romania and the USA as well as a 4th generation Denverite. Bejan is an award-winning, multilingual Romanian-American historian, theatre artist and spoken word poet living and creating in Denver, Colorado. An Oxford DPhil and a recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship and a Fulbright, she has held fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Georgetown University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center, and has taught history at four universities and Wake Technical Community College. She serves as a Guest Lecturer for the Foreign Service Institute and the Romanian-American University (Bucharest). After teaching history and theatre at Metropolitan State University of Denver for four years, Bejan has joined the University of Denver to teach and research in her area of academic expertise: the Holocaust. Please visit her Academia.edu page for more information. Here is Bejan's CV.
A playwright, Bejan has written nineteen plays, many of which have been produced in the United States, Romania, the United Kingdom and Vanuatu. She writes creatively in five languages and has been published internationally in every genre she writes in: academic, theatrical, and poetry. She is founding executive director of the arts and culture platform Bucharest Inside the Beltway (BiB). Under her stage name “Lady Godiva,” she performs her poetry across the United States and Romania.
She has written the history book Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), poetry collection Green Horses on the Walls (Finishing Line Press, 2020), play anthology FINALLY QUIET: Four Plays from Bucharest to Washington DC (No Passport Press, 2023), her play about post-Holocaust Buchenwald (Next Stage Press, 2023), the play To Those Who Haven't Stopped Thinking (Next Stage Press, 2024), the play "J'y suis j'y reste [Here I am, here I stay]" (published in Voices on the Move eds. Domnica Radulescu and Roxana Cazan) and is also a contributing author (64 articles and coauthor of the African introduction) for "The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933 - 1945, Vol. 3" (University of Indiana, 2018). She has two published plays forthcoming in 2024.
Bejan's history and poetry books have been released in Romanian translation with Editura Litera and Editura Tracus Arte. Please check out Books More Info for details on all her books with information about how to order directly from Bejan. She has appeared on C-SPAN and three different Romanian national/international TV news channels, as well as Romanian local, national, and international radio. Her work has been featured in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, BOMB Magazine, Denver Westword, American Prospect, Libertatea, Evenimentul Zilei, and Observator Cultural. Bejan is on the Board of Directors for ARCHER (the American Romanian Coalition for Human and Equal Rights, Chicago, for which she serves as Vice President), and the Advisory Board of Alianța (Washington DC).
As a recipient of merit-based academic scholarships and a graduate of Wadham (University of Oxford's most progressive college), Bejan is passionate about LGBTQIA+ and Equal Rights, as well as access to education. She is an advocate for The Alex Fund, a non-profit that works to make education available to every disadvantaged child in Romania and Project HOPE, a charity that provides medical relief and training in crisis zones across the world. As a survivor, Bejan is an activist for NAMI and RAINN. A proud member of PEN America, Colorado Authors League, Poetry Society of Colorado, International Center for Women Playwrights, Dramatists Guild of America, and Poetry Society of America, Bejan is currently writing a book about the unknown history of the Holocaust, the volume Theatre as Survival and Resistance (co-authored with Domnica Radulescu), a collection of poems and essays titled And the caravan rolls on, and her next play titled "Born Colorado" about her birth state's difficult history of the mid-20th Century. Please visit Bejan's Photo Gallery, Video, and Podcast & Radio for more about her creative life.
FINALLY QUIET: Four Plays from Bucharest to Washington DC
FINALLY QUIET Four Plays from Bucharest to Washington, DC by Cristina A. Bejan. This volume collects four spirited, imaginative and provocative plays from Romanian-American dramatist Cristina A. Bejan. The plays are: TO THOSE WHO HAVEN'T STOPPED THINKING, DISTRICTLAND, FINALLY QUIET IN MY MIND and LIFE ACCORDING TO SWAMI SHIVA.
From a dystopian investigation of the impact of totalitarianism, an absurd satire about American ambition, a cry for mental health awareness, and a timely critique of Putin's Russia, Bejan's plays span the world and ultimately capture the universal beating of the human heart. Published March 19, 2023, No Passport Press. Book cover art by E. Christopher Clark.
"Bejan's distinctive voice flows strongly through this anthology of plays bringing brutal honesty to worlds with characters who are vulnerable, cruel, ambitious, and fully human ... In the world of theatre where the woman's voice is often missing, Bejan lifting hers is a gift."
- Susan Lyles, Founder and Producing Artistic Director, And Toto too Theatre Company
"Bejan's plays invite us to listen closely, then ask us to reflect on the freedoms we so often take for granted. From beyond the universe to the neighborhoods of Washington DC, she calls attention to the absurd nature of our artificial social structures and the rarity of true connections with other people."
- Heather Beasley, Associate Artistic Director, Butterfly Effect Theatre of Colorado (formerly Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company)
"Bejan's elegant plays circle around the difficult quest for belonging that is at one and the same time tied to a specific time and place and timeless and universal."
- Blair Ruble, Distinguished Scholar, Woodrow Wilson Center, and author of Washington's U Street: A Biography
Recent book reviews - all book reviews available on Academia.edu
