Meet Bucharest Inside The Beltway
Cristina A. Bejan, PhD (BiB 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.
Ivona Iacob (BiB Creative Producer, London) is a theatre lover from Timisoara, Romania. She is about to complete a Master’s degree in Creative Industries & Cultural Policy at the University of Glasgow and also holds a Bachelor of Arts in Ethics, Politics and Economics from Yale University. Her passion for arts & culture has been cultivated through the years in various forms, whether as a culture desk writer for her university’s newspaper or working with Sunlight Theatre, an independent Romanian theatre festival.
Rucsandra Pop, PhD (BiB 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 (BiB 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.