Staff - Community Storytelling Project

BIO: SUSAN DANOFF

SusanDanoff combines her many years of experience in storytelling, teaching, and facilitation in her work to bring small groups of people together to tell their stories in order to create understanding, compassion, and greater appreciation of diversity.

After many years working as a professional storyteller and teacher of storytelling, Susan began to realize that in many of her workshops, people were forming unusually strong bonds as they were sharing their stories. In 2007 she was invited to work with Princeton University’s Office of Information Technology in response to former Princeton President Shirley Tilghman’s initiative to make Princeton a more welcoming community for a diverse staff. Susan presented diversity workshops at Princeton over a two-year period. She has facilitated similar workshops at Rutgers and Syracuse Universities and at many teacher workshop, and she has also worked with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on effective storytelling practice.

As a professional storyteller, Susan has told stories in hundreds of schools, colleges, libraries, museums, and conferences. She has also has taught the art of storytelling to adults who wish to communicate more effectively and has presented workshops at schools, universities, and museums including the Princeton University Art Museum, the Friends Council on Education, the School of Education at West Chester University in PA, and at numerous teacher in-services. For twenty-one years she taught intensive summer storytelling seminars at Princeton for teachers under the auspices of the Princeton University Teacher Preparation Program.

Susan founded the nonprofit corporation Storytelling Arts, Inc., where she served as Executive Director from 1996-2007. Under her leadership, Storytelling Arts forged partnerships with fifty low-income and special needs schools and institutions in New Jersey, serving approximately 17,000 children in long-term programs to support learning and literacy. She also provided extensive teacher training in storytelling.

Susan has worked with diverse populations throughout her professional life. She majored in East Asian Studies at Princeton with a concentration in Chinese and taught for a year at Tunghai University in Taiwan. In recent years she has also offered storytelling and writing workshops in Beijing. For nine years Susan taught expository writing to international students at Princeton University. In her many years as a storyteller, Susan worked in long term programs for Trenton Head Start and the Trenton Public Schools. She has told stories, given keynote speeches, and offered workshops on storytelling at conferences for teachers in many New Jersey school districts, at the University of Michigan School of Education, the Michigan Council for Social Studies, the Fort Worth Literacy Conference, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Princeton University Art Museum, Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poetry Festival, and for the General Services Administration of the federal government.

Susan is author of the book The Golden Thread: Storytelling in Teaching and Learning and has produced three audio recordings. Women of Vision, now available on CD, won the Parents' Choice Gold Award.

Susan earned a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Princeton University, an M.A. in English from Rutgers University, and an English Teaching Credential from the University of California, Berkeley.