Profile with Cristina A. Bejan
Cristina A. Bejan, PhD (North Carolina & Wadham 2004), she/ea, is currently a Professor of History and Theatre at Metropolitan State University of Denver, Vice-President of the American-Romanian Coalition for Human and Equal Rights, and Executive Director of Bucharest Inside the Beltway. Bejan holds a MSt and DPhil in Modern History from Oxford University and a BA in Philosophy and Theater from Northwestern University. She has taught at four universities and one community college, and worked as a researcher at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum for four years. At USHMM she published 64 articles and coauthored the African continent introduction for their “Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Vol. 3.” Since then, she has published two award-winning books: history book “Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association,” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and poetry collection “Green Horses on the Walls” (Finishing Line Press, 2020), both will appear in Romanian translation in 2023 by top presses in Romania. Bejan has been a practicing theatre artist for thirty years and have worn every hat in the theatre imaginable. As a playwright she has written 19 plays. Her work has been produced in four countries and her play “J’y suis, j’y reste” about the immigrant experience has been published in the anthology “Voices on the Move.” (Solis Press, 2021). She is multilingual, speaking five languages and reading countless more. Fun Fact: Bejan is the only Rhodes Scholar who is a Romanian citizen; she is a proud citizen of Romania (EU) and the USA. (If the reader knows of more Romanian Rhodes Scholars or would like to connect with Bejan, please contact her at the links below.)
Please visit her at: LINKTREE Her website (cristinaabejan.com) LinkedIn (christinabehan) Facebook (cristina.adriana.908) Twitter (@LadyGodiva____) Instagram (@cristinaabejan_ladygodiva) Tiktok (cristina_ladygodiva)
Please visit Bucharest Inside the Beltway’s website (bibdenver.com) LinkedIn (Bucharest Inside the Beltway) Facebook (@BucharestInsidetheBeltway) Instagram (@bucharestinsidethebeltway)
Rhodes Project: What is your favorite thing to do in Denver, Colorado?
Cristina Bejan: I love Denver with all my heart and have no idea how I got so lucky to live here. I do my favorite things every day: spend time with my family, walk our fur-daughter (Princess Pickles) around the historic 19th Century downtown neighborhood we live in. Walk to the tram stop and take public transportation to work and teach at the greatest school on earth: Metropolitan State University of Denver, the first school in the USA to grant degrees to DACA students. MSU Denver’s students are majority immigrants, first generation American, and first generation college. I am always promoting and producing arts and culture with my organization “Bucharest Inside the Beltway,” which includes seeing lots of plays, concerts, and more, and collaborating with multicultural local and international artists. I think the bonus is that I can perform on local open mics regularly as Lady Godiva (my spoken word stage-name), and as an author, I am always writing when the moment moves me. And the sunshine and mountain-view? Colorado is simply stunning. So, to be perfectly honest, every day in Denver is my favorite day.
Rhodes Project: What kind of music are you listening to?
Cristina Bejan: I listen to a lot of rap music in different languages. My father raised me and my siblings listening to French and Italian pop, he always said that he was keeping those languages fresh by listening. I have found that listening to Romanian rap keeps my Romanian fresh. At the moment my favorite group is Supcarpați (which means “under the Carpathian Mountains”) — they are a mix of rap and Romanian folklore music, with traditional instruments. They have a performer who is ten years old and his spoken word freestyle is out of control. I listen to him to get inspired. They are kind of similar to Kalush Orchestra, the Ukrainian group that won Eurovision 2022.
Rhodes Project: Who is your favorite playwright?
Cristina Bejan: Rather than answer with a favorite playwright, I need to share a favorite theatre company and group of creative artists, including dramatists: Giuvlipen, which is Romania’s first Roma theatre company. The Roma are Romania’s most oppressed people with a traumatic history of slavery and extermination in the Holocaust. Giuvlipen, led by the fearless artist Mihaela Dragan, shatters all negative and racist stereotypes that Romanians have had of the Roma people for centuries. It is a feminist and futurist theatre company that has performed all over Europe to great success. And in addition, they have a hip-hop, rap/trap duo known as “Kali & Nico G,” which I had the great honor to witness and perform on the same stage as Lady Godiva at the Romanian-American National Festival in Washington DC, the summer of 2022.
Rhodes Project: When did you first become interested in theatre?
Cristina Bejan: I first became interested as a child. Growing up, my mother always took us to the theater. I’d say I’ve been interested in theater ever since I was cognizant.
Rhodes Project: Can you tell me a little bit about a current project?
Cristina Bejan: I’m working on the book publication of two of my 19 plays with No Passport Press, a press for women playwrights. The tentative title is “Not So Quiet Thinking: Two plays by Cristina A. Bejan.” The plays are my dystopian political critique of dictatorship called “To Those Who Haven’t Stopped Thinking” (which is a famous quote from the 1980s by Romanian dissident Doina Cornea) and my mental health advocacy play “To Those Who Haven’t Stopped Thinking.” Both plays were produced at Oxford. The manager of the Burton Taylor Theatre told me after our run that my play was the most successful show to that date in his theatre. The second play was a Finalist in Oxford University Dramatic Society’s New Writing Contest, and as such produced in Wadham’s Moser Theatre. (The fact that Wadham had its own theatre is one of the reasons I chose to be a student there, in addition to Wadham being Oxford’s most radical college.) “Finally Quiet In My Head” was also selected to be produced in the 2015 Washington DC Black Theatre Festival, where the play sold-out and promoted the charity NAMI (National Alliance for Mental Illness). I intend to publish more of my plays after this book’s release.
Rhodes Project: Can you tell me about a favorite past project – a course you taught, an article?
Cristina Bejan: My favorite past project would probably be the play that I directed while I was working in Vanuatu in the South Pacific. When I was in Oxford I started a women’s theater company with a friend called Theatre Fille de Chambre. We performed numerous pieces by female playwrights and focused on having female actors. When I was in Vanuatu, I decided I wanted to divide the work with local female performers. We met every day at the central NGO office in Port Vila, the capital. The play was organically created by conversations that took place between the women at this regular meeting group. We also worked at the University of the South Pacific at their campus in Port Vila. We came up with a play about a day in the life of three women in Port Vila, Vanuatu. It explored domestic violence, the expatriate community—Vanuatu was a shared colony between France and Britain, called the New Hebrides (in 2010 she celebrated her 30th Anniversary of Independence), and now there is quite a large Peace Corps contingent there—and the race relations on the island between the local people and the expatriate community. A local singer wrote the music for it and afterwards we had a talk-back session sponsored by UNIFEM. I am particularly proud of that project.
Rhodes Project: If you could have one superpower, what would it be and why?
Cristina Bejan: I’m a historian, so it would have to be time travel. I would love to be able to visit the places and meet the people I’ve studied. I’ve always wanted to meet Mircea Eliade, who is the central intellectual that I study and one of the main figures in my history book. He had a number of disciples who studied with him and I met one of them, Mac Linscott Ricketts, in 2009. He has recently passed away and I had the great honor to meet him when he was retired and living in the mountains of rural Virginia. That is the closest I ever came to meeting Eliade, so that was a spiritual experience. If I could meet Eliade, I would be happy. Not just to experience his creative genius, but also to personally confront him for his fascist activity.
Rhodes Project: If you could meet one female historical figure, who would it be and why?
Cristina Bejan: It would have to be Maitreyi Devi, protégé of Tagore and the subject of Eliade’s best-selling book Maitreyi. In his book of autobiographical fiction Eliade describes an aborted love affair with a young Indian woman when the protagonist is living in Calcutta/Kolkata. Maitreyi spent her life denying an affair happened, wrote her side of the story, entitled It Does Not Die, and confronted Eliade in the 1970s in Chicago. He denied everything. They made a movie in the 80s starring Hugh Grant called Bengal Nights and Maitreyi campaigned to have the film banned. I’d like to meet Maitreyi and hear her side of the story. As a woman, I am certain that her version of events is the truth.
Rhodes Project: What do you do just for you?
Cristina Bejan: My two athletic hobbies that I do just for me are yoga and ice skating. I am a certified Vinyasa instructor and I’ve taught yoga in both Washington and Durham, NC. I’m not teaching at the moment, but I still practice pretty regularly. As for skating, I was on my university ice hockey team. I ice-skate whenever I can and now I also have rollerblades to zoom around Denver’s great accessible concrete streets.
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