Co-Founder & Producing Director

Dan Swern is the co-founder and producing director for coLAB Arts in New Brunswick, NJ, engaging artists, social advocates, and communities to create transformative new work. Swern commissions new multidisciplinary creative work and artist residencies, and facilitates and commissions public art projects from mural and sculptural installation work to creative placekeeping efforts with local government and advocacy organizations. Swern’s verbatim theater projects have included two collaborations with journalist Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg: Life, Death, Life Again: Children sentenced to die in prison and Banished: Children on the sex offender registry. Swern is the creator, director, and designer of the Drama Desk-nominated culinary-theater project Shake & Bake: Love’s Labour’s Lost which ran off-Broadway in 2018. Swern teaches Creative Engagement for the Masters in Communications and Media graduate program at Rutgers University’s School of Communications and Information.

Instagram: @danswern

dan@colab-arts.org

Director of Education

John Keller has over 20 years of experience in theater performance and production, as well as arts education and administration, and socially engaged arts curriculum development. John is committed to creating projects that use the arts as a process to examine complex issues that affect community empowerment. While serving as Director of Education for coLAB Arts, John has developed educational residencies and teacher professional development in several central New Jersey schools. As a producer he has developed art for impact programming that center social science research in Domestic Violence Prevention, Transgender Healthcare, Immigration, Economic Justice, and Juvenile Justice System Reform. He currently teaches Theater for Social Development at Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts. John earned his undergraduate degree at Holy Cross and holds a Masters in Fine Arts in Acting from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts.

Instagram: @jpkeller2003

jpkeller@colab-arts.org