Biography
Born in Colorado at the height of the Cold War, CRISTINA A. BEJAN is a dual Romanian & USA citizen 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 (including Duke) 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 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). Under her stage name “Lady Godiva,” she performs her poetry across the United States & Romania.
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, the Huffington Post, American Prospect, Libertatea, Evenimentul Zilei, and Observator Cultural. Bejan is on the Board of Directors for Immigration Research Forum (Washington DC) and 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 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. 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 Holocaust, a collection of poems and essays titled "And the caravan rolls on," and two plays. Please find Bejan on cristinaabejan.com and LinkedIn.