Biography
Living and creating in Paris, France, CRISTINA A. BEJAN, DPhil (Oxon) is a dual-citizen of Romania and the USA. Bejan is an award-winning, multilingual historian, theatre artist and spoken word poet. An Oxford DPhil and a recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship and a Fulbright, she has held fellowships at the Aspen Ideas Festival, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Georgetown University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center, and has taught history at five universities and one community college. She has also served as Guest Lecturer for the Foreign Service Institute and the Romanian-American University (Bucharest). In 2025 the Rhodes Trust awarded Bejan with the George Parkin Distinguished Service Award.
Bejan has been featured on A&E's The History Channel, C-SPAN and multiple Romanian TV channels as well as international print and audio media: including the Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, Foreign Policy and ELLE Romania magazine. In NYC she has performed at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and launched five published plays at The Drama Book Shop. Bejan has most recently been commissioned to write the theatrical stage adaptation of Noman Manea's memoir "The Hooligan's Return." Manea is Romania's most famous living Holocaust survivor and the second most famous after Elie Wiesel. Manea was deported to Transnistria as a child. After surviving the Holocaust, Manea survived the crimes of Romanian communism before living in exile in the USA. He is the only author who writes in Romanian who is a frequent contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
A playwright, Bejan has written nineteen plays, many of which have been produced in the United States, Romania, the United Kingdom and Vanuatu. After a sold-out extended run in the 2014 Capital Fringe Theatre Festival, her hit play “DISTRICTLAND” was bought for TV development. The TV show pilot headlined the DC Independent Film Festival the following year. 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, established in 2014). Under her stage name "Lady Godiva", she performs her poetry across the United States & Romania.
Bejan 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, Solis Press, 2020), contributing playwright for "Ol Woman Naoia" (Next Stage Press, 2025), poet and editor for "SHATTERED: Artists Inspired by Artists" (New Meridien Press, 2025) and is also a contributing author (64 articles and coauthor of the African continent introduction) for "The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933 - 1945, Vol. 3" (University of Indiana, 2018). Bejan's history and poetry books have been released in Romanian translation with Editura Litera and Editura Tracus Arte.
Bejan is a founding Advisory Board Member of Alianța (The Romanian-American Alliance, Washington DC). As a recipient of merit-based academic scholarships and a graduate of Oxford’s Wadham College, Bejan is passionate about Equal Rights for all and 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 the Dramatist Guild of America, International Centre of Women Playwrights, Theatre Without Borders, PEN America, Poetry Society of America, Colorado Authors League, Poetry Society of Colorado, Colorado Poets Center, Colorado Theatre Guild, Boulder Writers Alliance, Aspen Writers Network, American Association of Rhodes Scholars and the Rhodes Society, Bejan is currently writing a history book titled "The Unknown Holocaust: Axis Crimes and Memory in Africa, France and Romania," 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 a play about Colorado's difficult history of the 20th Century.
A lifelong theatre practitioner, Bejan trained at Northwestern University, Studio Theatre Acting Conservatory, Interlochen Center for the Arts and the DC Coalition for Theatre and Social Justice. She is certified in Augusto Boal’s practice of Theatre of the Oppressed and steps into the practice at any opportunity. Actor, director, sound designer, producer and so much more – Bejan is happiest being immersed in culture and celebrating art in all forms. She is just as proud to have written a grassroots women’s rights play with local and international women in Vanuatu as she is to have collaborated on professional theatre productions with Broadway director Lila Neugebauer and actors Rosamund Pike (UK) and Maia Morgenstern (Romania).
Bejan’s most active socials are Instagram @cristinaabejan_ladygodiva and LinkedIn Dr. Cristina Adriana Bejan. NYT journalist Johnny Apple named Cristina “Lady Godiva” when she was selected as a Rhodes Scholar in Washington DC.
PLEASE VISIT: cristinaabejan.com