Anna Hays was born into a family of artists and grew up in the Hudson Valley. After graduating from Oberlin College, Anna worked in New York City as an assistant for the experimental theater company, The Wooster Group. While immersing herself in the rich alternative culture of downtown New York, she traveled uptown to study film history at Columbia University. Her interest in filmmaking continued to develop and soon she packed her bags and headed west. There, she landed the coveted position of producing low-budget features for B-movie king, Roger Corman. Under Corman's tutelage, Anna learned virtually every aspect of filmmaking, from directing, writing, editing and casting to distributing and exhibiting films. It was the ultimate master class in moviemaking and a unique introduction to the inner workings of the Hollywood film industry. After producing over a dozen features, she was recruited by fellow Corman alum, Francis Coppola, to produce a low budget feature for his company, Commercial Pictures. Soon after, she, along with Sean Penn, presented the underground Soviet rock-n-roll documentary, Rock, at the Sundance Film Festival.
Anna was then called back into the theater world as managing director of the environmental theater festival, Padua Hills. It was around this time that Anna began her search for a way to integrate her varied experience and start expressing her own ideas. She soon discovered the world of interactive storytelling using emerging media. Intrigued by the possibility of telling stories with new narrative tools, she began writing for a variety of storytelling mediums. Anna has been creating stories for books, animation, games, toys, film, and theme park attractions ever since.
