Following undergraduate and post-graduate research into popular educational theatre at the University of Oxford, Dan Baron Cohen 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, Baron Cohen worked as a visiting professor at the State University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. His past 21 years of collaborations with landless, indigenous, trade-union, university, and indigenous communities in Brazil, Peru, Chile^[2] in China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and since 2008, with an Afro-Indigenous community in the south-eastern region of the Amazonian state of Pará, have advanced his methods into a pedagogy of intercultural literacy and a poetics of "transformance". This pedagogy also draws on collaborations with the World Social Forum and the Brazilian Network of Arteducators (ABRA), and contributed to the 7th IDEA World Congress of Drama/Theatre & Education in Belém, Pará, IDEA 2010.^[3]