Ze'eva Cohen

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Ze’eva Cohen is a dancer, choreographer, and dance professor at Princeton University. Cohen came to New York from her native country, Israel, in 1963 to study at the Julliard School and perform with the Anna Sokolow Dance Company. She was also a founding member of Dance Theater Workshop, where she worked as a choreographer and dancer from the mid-sixties to the early seventies.

In 1971, she initiated her pioneering and highly acclaimed solo dance repertory program, which toured throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Israel for twelve years under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Arts Residency Touring Dance Program. The repertory included commissioned works, reconstructions, and her own original choreography comprising twenty-eight solos by twenty-three choreographers. In 1983, she founded Ze’eva Cohen and Dancers, a company for which she developed a diverse group repertory, performing in New York and on national tours. Cohen has also choreographed works for the Boston Ballet, Munich Tanzproject, Batsheva Dance Company, Inbal Dance Theater of Israel, The Alvin Ailey Repertory Dance Company, and many other national dance companies. Since 1996, she has been choreographing, producing, and performing Negotiations and, later, Female Mythologies, programs dealing with cultural, political, and social issues, focusing on women’s myths and lives.

In 1969, when Princeton University first admitted women undergraduates, Cohen was asked to teach and build a dance program in the context of the Program in Theater and Dance. She served as Head of Dance until June 2008. In 1971, Cohen was recruited by the International Baccalaureate Organization to assemble a committee of international artists and educators to create the curriculum and assessment criteria for Dance. This has become an ongoing activity involving international teacher training workshops and overseeing the appropriate application of the assessment criteria and standards in final examinations.

For the Love of Music and Dance: Avri Ohana — New Paintings and Ze’eva Cohen — Visual Aspects of Her Life in Dance, Westbeth Artist Gallery, New York City, June 15-July 6, 2019.

“Reclaiming my Jewish Yemenite Heritage” by Ze’eva Cohen featured in The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance (Oxford University Press, Feb. 2022)