About Jennifer

When storyteller Jennifer Rudick Zunikoff performs, biblical figures speak, rabbinic Midrash leaps off the pages of the Talmud, and Judaism’s rich folklore dances to life. And Jennifer’s contemporary stories challenge her listeners to respond to the issues confronting the Jewish community today. She uses storytelling as an educational tool to inspire children and adults to explore Judaism and their spirituality. Jennifer is a storyteller, teacher, and coach based in Baltimore, Maryland.

Since 1999 Jennifer has performed in synagogues throughout Maryland and Washington, D.C. and has performed and facilitated staff workshops at schools and camps. Her performances include stories of biblical women, her own versions of ancient folktales, and stories about modern Jewish history and Jewish leaders.

Recent performance and workshop venues include: The Center for Jewish History and the Jewish Education Project in New York City, NewCAJE Jewish Education conference in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Boston, Beth Israel Congregation near Baltimore, Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D. C., and University of Baltimore School of Law

As much as Jennifer enjoys performing, she loves teaching and coaching new storytellers. For the past eight years she has co-taught the “Oral History of the Holocaust” course at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. She facilitates weekly storytelling workshops and individual coaching sessions with her students. She has individually coached more than 80 students for this course alone.

Jennifer serves as a consultant for the Macks Center for Jewish Education in Baltimore. The Macks Center commissioned six original stories now included on her new CD,  The Growing Season, just released in November 2011.  The stories are based on stories from the Talmud, Midrash and Megillat Esther.

Since 2009, Jennifer has facilitated the Student Immigrant Stories project at Patterson High School. The SIS project, sponsored by the Jewish Museum of Maryland, teaches ESOL students how to tell stories about their immigration experience. Jennifer’s SIS students have performed at the Visionary Arts Museum, the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, St. Mark’s on the Hill Church, and for the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Committee national conference.

Jennifer coaches students, teachers, school principals, and librarians, teaching them to use their intuition to turn their mental images into powerful stories. She uses her training as a certified InterPlay teacher to help her students trust in the story they are meant to tell. InterPlay is an active, creative way to unlock the wisdom of the body. InterPlay is a creative process for personal and community transformation. Through powerful, practical ideas and a system of practices rooted in storytelling, movement, song, and stillness, participants gain access to their own “body wisdom” – what gives them purpose and makes them fully alive. Jennifer leads InterPlay training sessions for teachers, camp staff members, and community leaders.

Jennifer began using storytelling to help students learn and perform stories of Holocaust survivors back in 2002 when she participated in the first “Compassionate Listening for Jewish-German Reconciliation” project, traveling to Germany with 14 other Jewish Americans to share stories with German participants. Since her return from Germany, Jennifer has shared “And We Listened,” the story of her experience, with adult and teen audiences.

During the 2007 Baltimore Playwrights Festival, Jennifer received excellent reviews for her performance of Dorothy, the lead role in Almost Vermilion, a play about life in rural West Virginia in the 1950s. Later in 2007, Jennifer also performed this part and two others roles at the Kennedy Center’s “Page to Stage” Festival.

After September 11, 2001, Jennifer interviewed Muslim-American children, college students, professors, and imams about their experiences in America before and after the terrorist attacks. She has performed her program “Isaac and Ishmael, Jews and Muslims: Are We Our Brother’s Keeper?” for synagogues, middle schools, high schools, and colleges.

In May 2003, Jennifer served as the keynote speaker as she performed another original piece, “Remembering our Dance,” for the annual meeting of the Women’s Department of the Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore.

The following summer Jennifer presented her workshop, “Teachers Telling Tales” at the National Storytelling Network’s conference in Chicago.

In May 2004, Jennifer performed original family stories as the keynote speaker for the annual meeting of the United Jewish Fund and Council of St. Paul’s Women’s Division.

Jennifer has taught several storytelling workshops for the Center for Jewish Education in Baltimore, teaching Jewish educators about the benefits of storytelling and how to use storytelling in their classrooms. She has performed at the annual conference of the National Alliance of American Jewish Youth Workers and at the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education Conference.

Jennifer served as a keynote speaker at the Baltimore Girl’s Project annual conference in December 2000. She created and performed “Emily,” a dramatic performance for pre-teens and parents about a teenage girl struggling with body image, popularity, and self-esteem. “The Answer is in Your Hands” program is another of Jennifer’s programs that deal with the issues of peer pressure and rejection in a Jewish context.

Jennifer loves to bring to life the women of Torah through her first-person stories of Sarah, Rachel, Miriam, Ruth, Esther, and others. She also tells family stories and stories about her experiences in Israel, as well as Jewish folktales.

From the fall of 1998 through the spring of 1999, Jennifer toured the western United States, telling stories in Jewish communities in California, Oregon, Washington and Colorado. A Baltimore native, Jennifer began her storytelling career in 1994 while living in St. Paul, Minnesota.