Mark Cohen is an actor, director, teacher, and private coach who is returning to New York to join the Acting Faculty at Michael Howard Studios. He spent the last 25 years home-based in New England, where he taught Acting in the undergrad conservatories at Boston University and Emerson College.
Mark maintained a special relationship with Brown University: he was voted a President's Award for Excellence in Teaching during his 7 years in the Theatre Department, and returned annually to teach in the summer curriculum before creating and serving as Artistic Director for the TheatreBridge Company, one of three affiliated summer theatre programs he co-created under the dual sponsorship of Brown and Trinity Repertory Theatre.
In the programs at which he taught, Mark directed such plays as Angels in America, Cymbeline, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Neil Labute’s The Distance from Here and John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore.
As a professional actor, Mark worked all over New England. Favorite roles include Marius in The Road to Mecca, Uncle Peck in How I Learned to Drive (Boston Center for American Performance), Salter in A Number (Whistler in the Dark), and Bardolph in Lettice and Lovage (Gloucester Stage). His first theatre love is Shakespeare, and he entered the profession in the ensemble of Romeo & Juliet at Circle-in-the-Square. He has appeared in many Shakespearean roles, most recently, Prospero.
Mark’s long association with San Francisco-based film production company Abuela Luna, Ltd. resulted in the Emmy-nominated short film Shakespeare in the Shadows, a one-actor, one-camera, one playwright tour-de-force shot on location in and around the SF Bay area. He is the lead in their film in final stages of production with the working title Mirage slated for release in 2027. Mark also did voice-over narration for the award-winning documentary Play Like a Lion, and he is the voice of Jack London in a series of Bay Area PBS spots that celebrated the centenary of the writer’s death.