Biography
Janet Coleman is the author of The Compass, the definitive history of improvisational theater in America, and with Al Young, Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs, about the jazz musician. Her articles, stories and reviews have appeared in such publications as Vanity Fair, New York, Village Voice, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Esquire, Elle, Ploughshares, Fence, Global City Review, Yale/Theater, and The Bloomsbury Review.
She was a founding producer of the seminal off-off Broadway Loft Theater Workshop where she first teamed up with David Dozer. Coleman and Dozer’s collaborations in stage, film, video and radio have been anchored in the improvisational theater. In that tradition, they have performed as Andrew and Grace in the Clio and Gold Key Award winning promotional spot they created (among hundreds of other radio commercials) for the Random House best-seller Miss Craig’s 21 Day Shape-up Program for Men and Women; as The Town Crier et Ux in Maxi Cohen’s film Janet and David; as The Calculating Couple in the NPR series Been There, Done That; and as Charles and Emily Ann Andrews, the young married couple who adopts an old man from the Welfare Department on Dozer’s long running WBAI/Pacifica radio comedy series, Poisoned Arts. Currently, they produce and host WBAI’s Cat Radio Café and will soon launch a new program for the Progressive Radio Network (www.prn.com) called Lateral Thinking.
Coleman has taught improvisation at The Loft, Rutgers, The O’Neill Foundation, the Actors Studio, the Puerto Rican Travelling Theater, and The New School, and has been a group-ologist in the creation of such performance groups as The Loft Players, Magic Cabbage (for teenagers), The Severn Darden Players, The Group That Argues, The Atlantica Radio Empire and the political satire company, The Christmas Coup Comedy Players (CCCP) heard on WBAI and KPFT’s The Monthly Laughing Nightmare. She played Evelyn Lincoln in Thirteen Days, Kevin Costner’s film about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
For Pacifica Radio, she has produced and hosted Howl Against Censorship, the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s poem. As Arts Director of WBAI, she produced the PEN Prison Writing Awards, Live from the Obies, and was Artistic Director of the annual Bloomsday/James Joyce marathon. She continues to produce The Next Hour, a program of intellectual inquiry that has featured Gore Vidal, Paul Krassner, Wallace Shawn, Robert Scheer, Malachy McCourt, Kate Valk, Bruce Wagner, Karen Finley, and many more. Recently, she played one of the Believers in ADS, playwright Richard Maxwell’s experiment in three-dimensional videography at P.S. 122 in New York.