Prior to a 20+year career in financial services and executive search, Robert Coe was a journalist, an award-winning playwright, and a screenwriter living in New York City. His journalism appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine and Arts & Leisure, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, New York, The Village Voice, American Theatre Magazine, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. His first play, WAR BABIES – the first world premiere produced by the Tony Award-winning La Jolla Playhouse – received four nominations from the San Diego Theater Critics Circle, including Best New Play, and a Drama-Logue Award for Best Play. Coe’s book for THE PHOTOGRAPHER (music by Philip Glass, direction by JoAnne Akalaitis, choreography by David Gordon) opened the first NEXT WAVE Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), where his adaptation of Walt Whitman poems for ENDANGERED SPECIES (direction by Martha Clarke, music by Richard Peaslee) opened the ninth NEXT WAVE. At BAM Coe also served as dramaturg and occasional co-writer for Laurie Anderson's UNITED STATES: PARTS I-IV, a legendary work that propelled performance art into the international arts mainstream and inspired the NEXT WAVE’s founding. In the commercial theater, he wrote a new book for the Tim Rice/ABBA musical CHESS, directed by three-time Tony winner Des McAnuff for a seven-month national tour. He also co-wrote (with McAnuff) PERFECT LIGHT, a screenplay for Touchstone Pictures and the Walt Disney Company. Coe’s first book, DANCE IN AMERICA, was the official guide to PBS’s long-running "Dance in America" series. (Coe also performed as a dancer with Jane Comfort and Kennedy Center honoree Bill T. Jones.) In addition to writing the catalog for the first NEXT WAVE Festival, he also wrote the catalog for the First New York International Festival of the Arts, the largest performing arts festival of the twentieth century. More recently he published JOCK: a Memoir of the Counterculture (2015), about his years as a distance runner at Stanford University, where he graduated with Honors and Distinction, Phi Beta Kappa.