A NOTE From the RHODES TRUST Secretariat, 24 March 2025
Cristina A. Bejan is a Romanian-American theatre artist, poet, and historian. A prolific playwright, Bejan has written nineteen plays, with productions in the United States, United Kingdom, Romania, and Vanuatu. Her hit play “Districtland” was bought for TV development, and Next Stage Press has released three of her scripts. She writes creatively in five languages and has published countless poems, plays, and poetry translations in literary journals and anthologies.
Bejan is the founding executive director of the multicultural arts platform Bucharest Inside the Beltway and performs spoken word poetry under her stage name “Lady Godiva.” In New York City Bejan launched five published plays at the legendary Drama Book Shop and performed at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Bejan’s first two books are published in Romanian translation, and she often appears in national Romanian media as a cultural figure. A lifelong theatre practitioner, Bejan trained at Northwestern University, Studio Acting Conservatory, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and the DC Coalition for Theatre and Social Justice.
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Covering Note from Richard Hughes of the Rhodes Trust
Michael, ….. I’m not quite sure what you’re asking for. Cristina’s website has the most extensive biographical information: https://www.cristinaabejan.com/ and a contact email. Or you are welcome to copy the bio that we published in the graphic.
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About Cristina A. Bejan Author / Artist
Born in Colorado at the height of the Cold War, CRISTINA A. BEJAN, DPhil (Oxon) 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. Please visit her Academia.edu page for more information. Here is Bejan’s CV.
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.
Bejan has published 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; free audiobook here), 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) and is also a contributing author (64 articles and coauthor of the African introduction) for “The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933 – 1945, Vol. 3” (University of Indiana, 2018) and the play Ol Woman Naoia (Next Stage Press, 2025). Her play Colombo Calling – a play from Sri Lanka is forthcoming from No Passport Press and play anthology has been translated into Spanish: she is currently seeking a publisher.
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 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, The American Oxonian, American Prospect, Libertatea, Evenimentul Zilei, Observator Cultural and ELLE Romania Magazine, among others. 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 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 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, International Center for Women Playwrights, Dramatists Guild of America, Theatre Without Borders and Poetry Society of America, Bejan is currently writing the history book The Unknown Holocaust: Axis Crimes and Memory in Africa, France and Romania, 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 her next play titled “Born Colorado” about her birth state’s difficult history of the mid-20th Century. Please visit Bejan’s Photo Gallery, Video, and Podcast & Radio for more about her creativ
The Third Reich built labour camps adjacent to manufacturing facilities supporting the war effort.
Jews across Europe were trucked into the camps as slave labour and were worked to death.
In the ’60’s we began to hear that the labour camps were really death camps. Jews were crammed into gas chambers and executed en masse.
Somewhere, somehow, Teutonic logic went out the window. Instead of preserving a most precious resource, the Nazis executed 6m factory workers and self-sabotaged their war effort. Probably just after Ann Frank died in hospital!
The Holocaust History began to develop and take hold 20 years after the event.
The atrocity and horrors of the Gaza Holocaust are being inverted, rewritten and sanitised in real time. Australia is to spend 6m to help the cause.
One must trust that the good lady has not wasted her scholarship as a Holocaust educator.
For those interested here are two links to related articles by 2 distinguished Jewish scholars.
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-holocaust-denial/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/11/from-night-to-daylight/