Mary Cohen

With a strong interest and practice in peacebuilding, meditation, yoga, group singing, and improvisation, Mary L. Cohen is an Associate Professor of Music Education at the University of Iowa. She researches music-making and well-being, songwriting, and collaborative communities. She has been a keynote for conferences in Germany, Canada, and Portugal. In addition to her work as lead author of Music-Making in U.S. Prisons: Listening to Incarcerated Voices (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2022) with Stuart P. Duncan, she is collaborating on international initiatives to build social movements toward dismantling carceral logics and building caring communities. In 2009, she founded the Oakdale Prison Community Choir (http://oakdalechoir.lib.uiowa.edu/). In 2010 she began the Oakdale Songwriting Workshop where participants have written over 150 songs, and the Oakdale Choir has performed over 75 of these songs, available with the Creative Commons License. She has also written numerous journal articles and book chapters for Community Music at the Boundaries, My Body Was Left on the Street: Music Education and Displacement, Performing Arts in Prisons: Creative Perspectives, The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education, The Oxford Handbook of Community Music, The Oxford Handbook of Music Education, and The Oxford Handbook on Care in Music Education, among others.