Meet Bucharest Inside The Beltway
Cristina A. Bejan, PhD (Founding Executive Director, USA) is an award-winning historian, theatre artist, and poet. A Rhodes and Fulbright scholar, she has had fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Wilson Center and Georgetown University. She has taught at four universities and one community college in the USA and currently teaches history and theatre at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Bejan received her Masters and DPhil (PhD) in Modern History from the University of Oxford and her BA in Philosophy (Honors) from Northwestern University, where she also studied theatre. While a researcher for USHMM, she authored 64 articles on camps in Africa and Europe for the "Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos - Vol. 3." In 2019 she published her first history book “Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association,” and in 2020 debut poetry collection “Green Horses on the Walls.” Her most recent play “J’y suis j’y reste / Here I am, here I stay” was published in Voices on the Move, an anthology by and about refugees edited by Domnica Radulescu and Roxana Cazan. A playwright and spoken word artist (performing under her stage-name Lady Godiva), her creative work has appeared in the US, UK, Romania and Vanuatu. Please visit www.cristinaabejan.com for more info.
Amanda L. Andrei, MFA (Creative Producer, USA) With roots in the Philippines and Romania, Amanda L. Andrei hails from Virginia/Washington D.C. and currently resides in Los Angeles. Her plays are epic, irreverent, and medicinal. Full-length plays include Mama I Wish I Were Silver (Winner of the prestigious Jane Chambers Award 2022), Lena Passes By (Finalist at 2021 O'Neill Conference; Quarterfinalist 2020 Screencraft Stage Play Competition), Black Sky (Winner of Parity Productions 2020 Commission; Madison New Works Lab; Semifinalist 2019 Screencraft Stage Play Competition; Finalist 2020 New American Voices Festival), and Every Night I Die (Winner 2010 International Bottle Tree Award). Her work has been developed by Pasadena Playhouse, Playwrights Arena, La MaMa, Artists at Play, Son of Semele, In Full Color, Relative Theatrics, Bucharest Inside the Beltway, La-Ti-Do, and others. She is a member of the Echo Young Playwrights group, The Vagrancy Writers Group, Playground LA’s Writers Pool, and Dramatists Guild of America. She is a proud alum of VONA, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and was recently named a Sylvia Clare Brown fellow at Ragdale. She is a teaching artist with Fringe Benefits and producer at Aguas Arts Ink. College of William & Mary (BA), Georgetown University (MA), University of Southern California (MFA). Please visit www.amandalandrei.com for more info.
Rucsandra Pop, PhD (Founding Artistic Director, Romania) writes prose, poetry and drama and she is very active in a number of independent cultural projects. Three of her plays were staged at lorgean theater, and the fourth one will have the premiere this summer. Rucsandra is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Folklore at Bucharest University. She graduated with an MA in Ethnology, Cultural Anthropology and Folklore at Bucharest University and a BA in Romanian and English Philology at Transylvania University (Brasov, Romania). She also attended graduate programs in Journalism at Academia Istropolitana Nova (Bratislava, Slovakia) and in Sociology at the Central European University (Warsaw, Poland). In 2011-2012, Rucsandra was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Indiana University. During her year in the United States, she documented her journeys. The result of her intellectual exploration of the American continent was the photo exhibition Random America – People & Places. Signs & Artifacts and the poem called America – a Poetic Tourist Guide. Rucsandra is a contributor to various academic and cultural publications. Her PhD won the Society of Romanian Studies 2022 Keith Hitchins Dissertation Prize. Photo Credit: Iulian Dumitru
Roxana Nicolaescu (PR/Marketing, Romania) is a theatre goer and a theatre lover from Bucharest, Romania. She is licensed in Cultural Studies and has a master degree in Advertising and Communication. Her daily life is divided between her job as an event manager in Romanian central bank and working for independent projects. She started her own cultural association, Ginger Group, a web platform that helps young artists to express themselves as freely as possible. She first met Cristina Bejan back in 2008 when she worked PR for her play “Colombo Calling. A play from Sri Lanka.” That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.