After attending a professional children’s school and studying dance, Bonnie Zindel decided to move into something else. She worked in public relations at the Cleveland Playhouse as the public relations director from 1969 to 1972. Following this, she had her own radio show titled the “Intermission Feature” on Station WCLV-FM in Cleveland from 1970 to 1972, where she would interview people in the arts such as the Boston Symphony. She met her husband Paul Zindel, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and began to write plays, including one where she had a reading with actress Julie Harris as the lead. Ms. Zindel found that her direction was going toward the arts, so she continued writing books and plays. She then decided she wanted to do something meaningful, as it was difficult for her to write and fill up a page. She wanted to do something where she was present and could do good work.
Ms. Zindel attended Columbia University in New York, and received a Master of Science in 1994, deciding to become a psychoanalyst. After she graduated, she combined her two loves, creative writing and psychoanalysis, and started writing groups for creative people. She also received two certificates, including one in psychoanalysis supervision, from the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in 1996 and 2000, respectively. Ms. Zindel currently has been running her writing groups two days a week for the past 20 years, which The New York Times called “what might be the most nurturing writing groups in New York.” She serves as a psychoanalyst and supervising analyst for the National Institute Psychotherapy and Supervisory Training Program in New York since 1965. During this time, she also served the National Institute for Psychotherapy as psychoanalyst in 1998 and member of the supervisory training program in 2000, and was the founder and creative literary editor for Psychoanalytic Perspectives from 2001 to 2019.
A prolific writer, Ms. Zindel wrote her first play titled “I Am a Zoo” in 1976, which was performed at the Jewish Repertory Theatre and the Troupe Theatre. She went to write multiple other works such as “Lemons in the Morning” in 1983, “The Latecomer” in 1985 and “Adriana Earthlight” in 1987, among others. Currently, she is working on a play regarding French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir. Ms. Zindel also authored two books, “A Star for the Latecomer” in 1980 and “Hollywood Dream Machine” in 1984, and contributed to “Writing on the Moon: Stories and Poetry from Psychoanalysts and Others” in 2017.
Overall, to Ms. Zindel, raising her children and being a mother is the most wonderful experience in her life. She is also most proud of her work with her patients; it the most rewarding because people come to her in different phases of their life, and some people are even searching for their soul and how to be human beings. With each person she works with, she puts a part of herself in them. Additionally, her writing has been very instrumental in her life. As a wife and a mother, Ms. Zindel, in her later years, found a way to fulfill herself as a woman and recognized that there came a time in her life that she had to do what she had to do.
A member of the National Institute for the Psychoanalysts, Women in Film and the Actors Studio, Ms. Zindel has been awarded numerous accolades throughout her career for her myriad accomplishments. She was recognized for her Creative Contribution to the Field of Psychoanalysis in 2000, and received the Award for Pioneering Work: Creative Literary Editor from Psychoanalytic Perspectives in 2011, marking the first time a psychoanalytic journal published a creative writing work. Moreover, Ms. Zindel was selected for inclusion in the first edition of Who’s Who of Emerging Leaders in America, as well as several editions of Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in Entertainment and Who’s Who in the World.