Ep 13, IA Storyshare 2025: Jan Cohen-Cruz and Lynne Elizabeth

For this season of IA Storyshare, we brought together participants from the most recent national gathering at Las Cruces, NM - Providing Passage: Practicing the Worlds We Want, and asked them the following questions: How did you find your way to the IA community, What people, ideas, places, actions brought you here? And what has kept you coming back? Who, what, where in this network is a source of sustenance for you?

In this first episode of the season, longtime IA participants Jan Cohen-Cruz and Lynne Elizabeth take us down memory lane, and share their insights about the transforming ecology of publicly engaged scholarship.

Grounded in the resistant theater of the early 1970s, Jan Cohen-Cruz (pictured right) performed in street theater and co-facilitated a theater workshop in a maximum-security prison. She earned her PhD at NYU Performance Studies and then taught in the NYU Drama Department for 28 years, initiating the first minor in applied theater at a US university. In 2012, she received the Association for Theater in Higher Education’s Award for Leadership in Community-Based Theater and Civic Engagement. Jan was director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, co-founding its journal, Public. She was director of field research for A Blade of Grass and and co-researched its field guide for artist/municipal agency partnerships. Learn more >>>

Lynne Elizabeth (pictured left) is the founding director of New Village Press, an independent nonprofit publisher of progressive books that aim to enrich public discussion and understanding of issues vital to healthy, creative, and socially just communities. She is a past president of Architects / Designers / Planners for Social Responsibility and the founding director of the former Eos Institute for the Study of Sustainable Living. She has initiated numerous public programs, conferences, and exhibitions, and published the periodicals Earthword and New Village Journal. Learn more >>>