Diane and her puppet, Miriam, were in the 2007 NYC International Fringe Festival, a production of The Present Company. Diane Allison brought her one-woman, one-puppet show, "MIRIAM", to the famous NYC theater festival.

Diane Allison's beautiful pastel illustrations appear in a new picture book that was published by the Christian Science Publishing Society. It's called Big With Blessings with words by Christian Science founder, Mary Baker Eddy. Click here to sample some drawings.

Diane Worfolk Allison has a multi-faceted career, having spent years as a portrait artist, a Montessori teacher, a published illustrator and author of children’s books and essays, a storyteller and a performer. She travels to schools around the country, giving unique and appreciated workshops in writing and illustrating. She’s written scripts and songs for children’s television, musical plays for children and adults, and has many projects in the works. She continues to enjoy all work that comes to her, whether in illustration, teaching, story-telling or performing. Please click on the topics to the left to look at samples, and explore her latest projects. Feel free to contact her about work at any time.

Diane Allison’s childhood was immersed in music, dance, art, spirituality, books, and the love of nature. She listened spell-bound to friends’ stories of healing, her grandmother’s stories of life in the theater and as a newspaperman’s wife in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, her mother’s stories of life during the depression. Diane’s aunt, a curator, lectured her through tours of art museums in New York and Philadelphia. She was showered with books and given classes in ballet, art, spirituality and music. The demand of her religious training was to bring healing to the world. Growing up under the nuclear threat, she thought hard about what could help, and decided early that the only answer was education. It had to start with children.

So it isn’t surprising that the result is a career as a writer and illustrator of children’s books, a storyteller, a playwright, a performer, all bound up in a passion for children, a passion to teach.

Diane went off to Minnesota to attend college at Macalester. She stumbled through the academics, but thrived on the art and dance classes and her work in the theater and yearbook. She met and married her husband, Monroe, there, and in the turmoil of the Viet Nam era, they soon found themselves parents of a little girl in the inner city of Chicago living under a pastor’s roof, committed to civil rights and social programs. She became a Montessori teacher in her father-in-law’s school so her work would keep her close to her daughter. She wrote and illustrated reading books for the children, and years later, in Boston, these led to her first published picture books with Little Brown. Meanwhile she continued teaching, gave birth to their son, Paul, wrote scripts and songs for a children’s TV show, did children’s portraits, drew storyboards for Sears’ ads, wrote and directed musical plays for the public schools and performed original work for a local senior center.

After the move to Boston, other books followed, and another move -- to Brooklyn. There, she taught in a children’s musical theater program and honed her skills as an author-illustrator-storyteller, touring the country, visiting schools, giving various programs and workshops. Eager to learn more, she took classes from talented New York professionals in art, writing and theater. She’s recently polished a one-woman, one-puppet, one-act play, ‘Miriam’, a half-hour musical performance piece, her insights into the life of Moses’ sister, both heart-wrenching and funny.