Cristina A. Bejan

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 Romanian-American historian, theatre artist and spoken word poet living and creating in Denver, Colorado. She grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and received her BA in Philosophy (Honors) from Northwestern University, where she also studied theatre. 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 is currently Affiliate Faculty in the Theatre & Dance Department at Metropolitan State University of Denver where she was selected as a Finalist for the 2021 Faculty Senate Teaching Award, and a Guest Lecturer for the Foreign Service Institute and the Romanian-American University (Bucharest). 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) and is also a contributing author (64 articles and coauthor of the African introduction) for The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 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. 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 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 Immigrant 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). She is an advocate for NAMI and RAINN and volunteers for Colorado's Romanian philanthropy organization RAFA (the Romanian-American Freedom Alliance). She is a proud member of PEN America, the Colorado Authors League, the Poetry Society of Colorado, the International Center for Women Playwrights, the Dramatists Guild of America and the BETC Writers Group. In 2022 her plays appeared in the Colorado Women's Theatre Festival and the Peace for Ukraine Festival at Baron's Court Theatre, London, UK. Please visit Bejan's Photo Gallery, Videos, and Podcast & Radio for more about her creative life.