Robert Cohen was born in 1938 in Washington, D.C. His theatrical education began as an undergraduate student at Dartmouth College and UC Berkeley. He earned his doctorate in fine arts in 1965 at the Yale School of Drama. Soon after, Cohen joined the charter faculty of the new campus at the University of California, Irvine, where he served as the campus's founding departmental chair of drama for twenty-five years, and is now a Bren Fellow and the Claire Trevor Professor of Drama. Cohen is an accomplished director, scholar, drama critic, and theorist, and his approach to stage acting, which employs a system he refers to as "GOTE," has been acknowledged as one of the most widely used approaches to stage acting in use today.[3] Cohen resides in Laguna Beach, California with his wife Lorna. They have two children, Michael and Whitney.