Anita Zahn (born in Germany in 1904) was among the nine students of the Isadora and Elizabeth Duncan School who were brought by Elizabeth Duncan to America at the outbreak of World War I in August of 1914. They performed in America until 1920 when they went back to Switzerland for the summer. Anita Zahn remained in Europe for two years, and in 1922 she returned to the United States. She taught at Carnegie Hall and gave performances with her group of young Duncan dancers. In the late twenties she became the director of the New York branch of the Elizabeth Duncan School, and later established her own, Anita Zahn School of Duncan Dancing, in New York. The school also had branches in Summit, NJ, Nuntucket (Siasconset), and Summer schools in New Jersey and East Hampton, Long Island. She also served as the faculty at The Spence School in New York for more than 20 years.
From the late 1920s through mid 1960s, Anita Zahn arranged annual spring recitals of her school in New York as well as numerous performances in various theaters and halls. Among the most distinguished productions were “The Children's Christmas Story” (1953) with Leopold Stokowski as the director and conductor and Robert Edmond Jones as the designer; and “Arouse and Beware,” a trilogy based on Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1936). She died in 1995.
From the guide to the Anita Zahn professional and personal papers, 1920-1991, (The New York Public Library. Jerome Robbins Dance Division.)
