Nicole Coiscou is a producer, actress, activist, consultant, and journalist. Currently casting and talent director for Dominicana’s Got Talent, she also works as the manager of the independent artist SNENiE, as well as a communication strategist for the nonpartisan movement Por Ti RD.

She has produced festivals such as Revoltiao Weekend, Revoltiao Burger Weekend. She has also done projects in New York City such as Songs for the North, with the participation by Laura Gómez, and BROOKLYN LOVES YOU, and Dominican Sounds, a sold-out show at SOBs featuring the best of Dominican Republic’s pop and indie scene.

Currently, she resides in Santo Domingo where she works to raise awareness through art for gender violence and incentivizes cultural diversity through her concert productions and creative spaces. She has a degree in Journalism and Design and is a theatre minor alumna from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts.

A professional journalist for more than two decades, I started out as a stringer in Moscow during the last years of the USSR.  Thanks to the great fortune of winning an Alicia Patterson fellowship in 1996, I spent a year reporting from the war zones of the former Soviet lands and Afghanistan.   I spent the next six years based in Moscow, covering Russia and the ex-USSR as a staff correspondent for TIME.

Since returning to the U.S., I've written two books of nonfiction. BLACK EARTH is a history of Russia’s first post-Soviet decade, as told by way of a travelogue. THE LOST SPY is part history, part detective story--a biography of Isaiah "Cy" Oggins, a 1920s American Communist turned Soviet spy. 

At Lang, my interest lies in creating a classroom not of pre-professional journalists, but critical readers and writers. The emphasis is not on acquiring skills, but learning craft—through writing, rewriting and more rewriting.  As a co-founder of the Journalism+Design program, I have enjoyed opening the classroom to as wide a spectrum of media as possible—from documentaries to photojournalism to music.