Ann Zane Shanks
Ann Zane Shanks was a producer and photojournalist best known for her Emmy-nominated work on the 1985 informational special A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape, a PBS documentary narrated by Kirk Douglas.
Over the course of her career as a photojournalist, Shanks captured images of Barbra Streisand, Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, Eleanor Roosevelt, Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland and John Wayne, among many other notables. Her photographs were published in a variety of prominent magazines including Time, Look, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Redbook and Woman’s Day. Her work also appeared in exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, the New York Transit Museum and the New York Historical Society.
She compiled a 700-image volume of her photos called One Woman Show: The Photographs and Life of Ann Zane Shanks. She also published four other books: About Garbage and Stuff, Old Is What You Get, Busted Lives: Dialogues with Kids in Jail and Ann Zane Shanks Photographs.
She often collaborated with her husband, former ABC executive Bob Shanks, as a producer on the television movies Drop-Out Father, which starred Dick Van Dyke; Drop-Out Mother, starring Valerie Harper; He's Fired, She's Hired; and the documentary The Avant-Garde in Russia: 1910 to 1930—New Perspectives. Together they also produced and directed the 1970s' syndicated series American Lifestyle, which told the stories of great Americans and their homes. She also directed the 1979 crime television movie Friendships, Secrets and Lies.
Ann Zane Shanks was a producer and photojournalist best known for her Emmy-nominated work on the 1985 informational special A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape, a PBS documentary narrated by Kirk Douglas.
Over the course of her career as a photojournalist, Shanks captured images of Barbra Streisand, Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, Eleanor Roosevelt, Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland and John Wayne, among many other notables. Her photographs were published in a variety of prominent magazines including Time, Look, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Redbook and Woman’s Day. Her work also appeared in exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, the New York Transit Museum and the New York Historical Society.
She compiled a 700-image volume of her photos called One Woman Show: The Photographs and Life of Ann Zane Shanks. She also published four other books: About Garbage and Stuff, Old Is What You Get, Busted Lives: Dialogues with Kids in Jail and Ann Zane Shanks Photographs.
She often collaborated with her husband, former ABC executive Bob Shanks, as a producer on the television movies Drop-Out Father, which starred Dick Van Dyke; Drop-Out Mother, starring Valerie Harper; He's Fired, She's Hired; and the documentary The Avant-Garde in Russia: 1910 to 1930—New Perspectives. Together they also produced and directed the 1970s' syndicated series American Lifestyle, which told the stories of great Americans and their homes. She also directed the 1979 crime television movie Friendships, Secrets and Lies.
For the theater, Shanks produced Lillian for Broadway in 1986, as well as S.J. Perelman in Person, an off-Broadway production, in 1989.
Shanks died May 11, 2015, in Sheffield, Massachusetts. She was 93.
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