Fonds F0491 - Ruth Dworin fonds

Ruth Dworin is a freelance bookkeeper, arts administrator, artistic produces, and tour organizer. After meeting Lucia "Kim" Kimber and Kathy Lewis at the 4th National Women's Music Festival in Champaign-Urbana in 1977 and several more events, the three women established Women's Music Archives as a non-profit organization based at Kimber's home in Fairfield, Connecticut in the fall of 1978. The WMA served "the primary function of the Women's Music Archives is to collect and preserve, for herstorical listening and research purposes, all types of materials related to women's music." The bulk of the collection focused on "woman-identified, woman-made music, primarily, though not exclusively feminist and lesbian in orientation" that "evolved as a definite entity" beginning in the early 1970s.

Dworin then founded Womynly Way Productions in September 1980 and directed the arts organization which produced concerts and events featuring women from all over North America in music, theatre, dance, and comedy until 1990. Dworin also produced the LEAF Roadshow, a cross-Canada tour featuring over fifty performers in 1989.

After consulting since 1984, Dworin established Creative Consulting in 1991 to address the administrative needs of the arts community, and to provide computer training for artists and arts administrators. She is now a bookkeeper for the Chocolate Woman Collective (formed in 2007), an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and inter-generational collective, comprised of senior Indigenous artists, scholars, and their collaborators to research and create the theatrical performance.