Following undergraduate and post-graduate research into popular educational theatre at the University of Oxford, he was apprenticed to the playwrights Edward Bond (England) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong"o (Kenya) whose life projects inspired a lasting search for methods of community-based cultural action for justice.
In 1998, Dan Baron Cohen worked as a visiting professor at the State University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. His past nine years of collaborations with landless, indigenous, trade-union and university communities in Brazil, Peru, Chile and, more recently, in China, Taiwan, of Korea and Japan, have advanced his methods into a pedagogy of intercultural literacy and a poetics of "transformance". At the 2007 International Drama in Education and the Arts ( the International Development & Education Award) World Congress, Dan Baron Cohen was reconfirmed as the President of the International Development & Education Award. He has published Theatre of Self-Determination (Derry, 2001), Alfabetização Cultural: a luta íntima por uma nova humanidade (Cultural Literacy: the intimate struggle for a new humanity), São Paulo 2004, and numerous articles
He is the cousin of well-known comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.
As the President of the International Drama-Education Association ( the International Development & Education Award) until July 2010, Dan Baron Cohen was also Coordinator of the World Alliance for Arts Education, and was a member of the International Committee for the World Social Forum.
