Author, educator, and producer-director Robert Carl Cohen was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 24, 1930. He received a B.A. in art in 1952 and an M.A. in film in 1954, both from the University of California at Los Angeles. His further graduate work included studies at the Sorbonne and at the University of Southern California. Since completing his academic work Cohen has worked primarily in television. His first important work was as an NBC special correspondent to mainland China during 1957. At that time he was the first U.S. citizen allowed to film in China following its control by the Communists. In 1961 the film he shot during this period was integrated into a special television documentary entitled Inside Red China. Cohen later also became the first U.S. citizen permitted to film in East Germany (1959) and Cuba (1963) after those nations established Communist governments. These experiences became the basis for the documentaries Inside East Germany (1959) and Three Faces of Cuba (NET, 1964).
In addition to these documentaries Cohen has worked for the media in other capacities. These other projects include: writer, producer, and director for the independent television documentary Committee on Un-American Activities (1962); writer, producer, and director for the feature-length film Mondo Hollywood (1965-1967); training supervisor for minorities at MGM (1973-1974); and writer and producer for With Reason and Humanity, a stage dramatization of the Rosenberg trial produced in California in 1975.
Cohen's published work includes The Color of Man (1968), an award-winning exposition of racial issues for children that was used as a seventh grade textbook in California public schools, and Black Crusader (1972), an unauthorized biography of the black revolutionary Robert Franklin Williams.
