Ralph Alan Cohen is Co-Founder and Director of Mission at the American Shakespeare Center and Gonder Professor of Shakespeare and Performance and founder of the Master of Letters and Fine Arts program at Mary Baldwin College.

He was project director for the building of the Blackfriars Playhouse and he has directed 30 productions of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including America’s first professional production of Francis Beaumont’s "The Knight of the Burning Pestle". He also directed the first revival of Thomas Middleton’s "Your Five Gallants" and co-edited the play for Oxford University Press’s Collected Works of Thomas Middleton.

He is the author of "ShakesFear and How to Cure It: A Handbook for Teaching Shakespeare".

He twice edited special teaching issues of the Shakespeare Quarterly and has published articles on teaching Shakespeare as well as on Shakespeare, Jonson, and Elizabethan staging. He founded the Studies Abroad program at James Madison University, where he won Virginia’s award for outstanding faculty. He has frequently directed summer institutes on Shakespeare and staging sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In 2001, he established the Blackfriars Conference, a bi-annual week-long celebration of early modern drama in performance. In 2008, he won the Commonwealth Governor’s Arts Award. In 2009, he was the Theo Crosby Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. In 2013, he was awarded the Folger Shakespeare Library's prestigious Shakespeare Steward Award.

He earned his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College and his doctorate at Duke University.