Anna Ostroff is a Tony-award winning theater producer and the head of a non-profit that brings arts education into New York public schools. Somehow, she also manages to work fulltime at School For The Dogs, where she trains dogs with behavior issues, manages (and teaches) group classes, and generally keeps everyone smiling with her sunny disposition and "can do" attitude. Here, she and Annie discuss her lifelong love of animals, her foster dogs, and her passion for teaching tricks to urban dogs and helping dogs deal with fear and anxiety.  

Anna's non-profit

http://www.arts-for-all.org/ 

Anna's theater company: 

https://infinitytheatre.com/

Book a session or class with Anna: 

http://schoolforthedogs.com/services

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Partial Transcript:

Annie:

So listeners, I am joined today by someone who started out at School for the Dogs as a client, and then became an apprentice and then became a trainer. And along the way became one of my very, very good friends. So I’m happy to have any excuse to talk to her. Anna Ostroff. Hello, Anna.

Anna Ostroff:

Hi, Annie. Awesome to be here today, and I totally agree. Any excuse to talk to you is also awesome.

Annie:

Remember when you first started, Anamarie was with us and it was like, Anna, Annie, Anamarie.

Anna:

We had so many A names at that time. That was crazy.

Annie:

We had Addie

Anna:

Alison Joy.  We had so many As.

Annie:

Yeah. So yeah, I of course know how you winded up at School for the Dogs, but it’s a pretty interesting path, I would say, especially because you have a whole other career both in your past and in your current life, which I think probably your current clients would be interested to hear a little bit about. So maybe before you start telling us about your dog life, you could tell us about your non dog life? All the things you were doing and continue to do professionally, not relating to dogs.

Anna:

Sure. Yeah. So, well, it’s hard to say like my pre-dog life, because I think animals and dogs have actually always been a huge part of my life, even when it wasn’t necessarily a professional part of my life. But what you’re talking about is my theater background. So I actually still, I have a theater company in Annapolis, Maryland that is run with my husband, Alan.

The name of the theater company is Infinity Theater Company. And Alan now does most of the day to day on that. And since of course COVID hit, we have not been able to do any productions, which is very sad. So we’ll see what happens and where the world takes us. But before all of that, we had actually just celebrated our 10 year anniversary as a theater company, which is really cool. And we’ve produced shows regionally in Maryland where the theater is that we use every summer. It’s just a summer theater.

But we’ve also been fortunate enough to produce on Broadway as well. And have been involved in a couple of shows on Broadway. We were co-producers on the Pippin revival for those who remember that, and actually won a Tony award for that production was incredibly exciting. And we also had a production that started at our theater in Annapolis, which later moved to New York to Broadway called Dames at Sea, which is a really fun musical, lots of tap dance. And we were fortunate enough to be able to be the lead producers on that production on Broadway.

Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcast

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