Biography
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.
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, 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) 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. 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 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 Wadham, 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, Colorado Poets Center, 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 a play about Colorado’s difficult history of the 20th Century. Please visit cristinaabejan.com for more info.