Ryan Bunch, President of The International Wizard of Oz Club at the time of this presentation, received the L. Frank Baum Memorial Award during the Oz: the National Convention 2024 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Ryan saw the 1939 MGM Wizard of Oz film on television as a child, found the Oz books of L. Frank Baum at his public library, and by third grade was permanently hooked. At age 11 he won the Oz Quiz at his first Oz Club convention—the Quadling Convention in Tulsa Oklahoma— and became a regular attendee at that annual event. Ozmapolitan and Winkie conventions soon joined his list of annual summer adventures.
Ryan didn’t just attend conventions, his talent at the piano led to him performing in Oz musicals and sing-alongs to support convention programs. He staged or participated in puppet shows including A Day in Oz with puppeteer Bill Eubank in 1992. For his puppet version of Buratino in the Emerald City, performed at the Club’s Centennial convention in Bloomington, Indiana, Ryan made puppets, wrote music and songs, and performed in the show; the story was based on Leonid Vladimirsky’s 1996 Russian children’s book that brought Pinocchio to Oz.
Since those early years, Ryan, with his husband Micah Mahjoubian, cochaired Oz: the National Convention 2016 in Philadelphia where he partnered with local arts organizations to create Oz-theme programs. Convention attendees explored the Oz sites in the region associated with Oz creators Ruth Plumly Thompson, John R. Neill, W.W. Denslow, Charles Santore, and Maxfield Parrish.
Ryan had been working his way up in Oz Club leadership since 2010 when he was elected to the Board of Directors. He was elected vice president in 2016 and president in 2022. He also won the Winkie Award in 2015.
In addition to convention and administration support of the Club, Ryan has written for The Baum Bugle, and participated in Club projects, such as the online reading of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz during the Covid pandemic. He’s represented the Oz Club in media interviews, and worked on committees most notably chairing the Nominating Committee for our Board of Directors for many years.
The combination of two loves, Oz and musical theater, led to the 2022 publication by Oxford University Press of his book, Oz and the Musical: Performing the American Fairy Tale. The book discusses Oz musicals from the 1902 Oz stage version to Wicked, with numerous stops along the way, including the MGM film version, The Wiz, Oz Club conventions, and the Land of Oz theme park on Beech Mountain, North Carolina,
Ryan received his Ph.D. in the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers-University Camden in 2023. He currently teaches music studies at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Congratulations to Ryan for a lifetime of advancing appreciation for Oz and service to the Club!
