Dan Baron Cohen is a community-based arts-educator and cultural activist from Wales, who lives and works in Brazil. After sustained collaborations with post-industrial communities in northern England and South Wales, and with conflicted communities in the north of Ireland, Dan moved to Brazil to collaborate with the landless, indigenous and communities centered around trade-unions and universities. 

His past twelve years have been dedicated to the popularization of arts-based pedagogies of cultural education for transformation. His ‘transformance’ pedagogy has been taught as undergraduate and post-graduate courses in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa and applied in marginalized communities to nurture democratic and sustainable urban renewal, ‘solidarity police’, and the advocacy for a new paradigm of education for transformation, based on the arts.

Dan was President of the International Drama-Education Association (IDEA) from 2004-2010 and Chair of the World Alliance for Arts Education from 2006-2010. He is a member of the International Council of the World Social Forum and an adviser to the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. He has published plays, numerous articles and books on arts education. 

The below initial paragraph is from his article titled Towards a Pedagogy of Transformance.

I believe the artistic languages – of theatre, particularly – contain the most useful tools for revealing and distancing us from the contradictions within our subjectivities and our ‘structures of feeling’, towards the development of new reflexive, independent and cooperative subjectivities. I am not proposing that theatre can solve the world, nor offer a new methodology. Nor am I proposing that what I understand to be ‘cultural literacy’ can alone transform the aesthetics of individualism and competition – the cultural forms that presently mutilate our subjectivity, define how we see and feel, and threaten the very future of the world – into an aesthetics of cooperation.

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