Bio

For twenty-five years Wanna Zinsmaster has told stories in schools, libraries, churches, as well as for organizations, conferences and home gatherings. Her background in education has allowed her to work with teachers and students in storytelling and also to develop the curriculum. She was featured in the Fall issue of the Occidental College Alumni Magazine.

At California State University, Los Angeles, she developed the storytelling class and the Storytelling Certificate Program. During this time she also taught Creative Drama for Teachers. Her experiences demonstrated that through dramatization and the telling of stories, either from books or life experiences, the feelings and thoughts of those periods are brought to life and experienced by the participants. Thus the people in those periods come alive and are seen as real people with thoughts and feelings. Storytelling and dramatization allows the participants to discover that people in the past had some of the same feelings and thoughts that they themselves experience in living their own lives. Working with storytelling and dramatization a new awareness of the importance of communication skills can be developed and refined.

Students dramatizing Abe Lincoln story

For several years Wanna was co-director of the Los Angeles Basin Storytelling Festival held at California State University Los Angeles. She has been a presenter at the National Council of Teachers of English, the California Council of Teachers of English, the International Reading Association, the California Reading Association, the Educational Theatre Association and the National Conference of Bilingual Educators. In 1988 she represented the Pacific Region at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesbourgh, Tenn.

During her tenure at California State University Los Angeles she developed and implemented a student teaching program in France. She also received a grant from Canada to study Canadian Children’s Literature in order to develop a course at California State University Los Angeles.

Wanna was awarded a Sunbird Grant from the California State University Chancellor’s Office to give an innovative field trip course in FOLKTALES, ART, AND SCHOOL CURRICULUM. She also received a grant from the Tri-University Project for post-doctoral study at New York University. She co-authored a study “Choreography of Teaching: A Conceptual Model.” This research resulted in a monograph “Contributions of the Field of Directing in the Performing Arts to the Field of Teaching.”

Wanna is an avid hiker, a Chi Kung practitioner, and she regularly spends hours walking and celebrating the beauty of the Huntington Gardens, near her home in Pasadena California.

In her travels around the world she has ridden camels and hiked across the Hoggar Mountains of Algeria in the Sahara Desert. While in the Sahara she experienced the first rain in fifteen years.

Thirty-five years ago in East Africa she found the excitement of seeing not only animals in their natural environment but also visiting local villages and schools. On her South Pacific sea voyage the ship was caught in a typhoon near Fiji. The propeller was damaged and she, with all the passengers, was taken ashore to Fiji on a tugboat. The most amazing adventure was a trip to Antarctica twenty years ago. While there she rode in zodiacs (rubber boats) near various types of seals and even inside an iceberg, walked over the frozen earth with penguins, and learned the history, political and natural, of the area. One of her fondest memories is swimming in the ocean waters, in Antarctica, made hot through volcanic action. Truly an amazing experience.

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