Judith Dancoff

Teaches at Mt. Washington Writers' Workshop

My road to becoming a writer began with a paintbrush that transformed into a film camera and came to rest on a Smith Corona typewriter. 

Along the way, I made a film on the feminist artist Judy Chicago, wrote journalism for the L.A. Weekly, L.A. times, Family Circle and Mademoiselle, and worked at endless day-jobs, including as a secretary at the original World Trade Center, and an English teacher at the United Nations. 

As a writer, I am inspired by content from my own life as well as more fictional narratives. It seems to me that the most important work comes from the two or three inner dramas we are compelled to tell, again and again. Sometimes these find expression as memoir or autobiographical fiction; other times, they can only find release through great leaps of imagination. One of my strong interests as a teacher is in helping students connect to these narratives in themselves. 

My stories and essays have appeared in the Alaska Quarterly, Creative Nonfiction, Other Voices, the Southern Humanities Review, Tiferet Journal, and other journals. My novella “Women Bathing”—a coming-of-age narrative about a young woman painter in late 19th C Paris who becomes involved in the Dreyfus Affair—was published in 2014. 

I am a member of the Southern California Alumnae Council for Hedgebrook, the foremost retreat for women writers in the country, and have been in residence at Hedgebrook as well as the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I hold an MFA in writing from Warren Wilson College, an MA in education from Columbia University, and an MFA in filmmaking from UCLA.