Xenia Zarina

June Zimmerman was the daughter of Oliver Brunner Zimmerman and Grace Adele Bushnell Zimmerman. Contrary to some accounts of her early life,[1] both of her parents were born in the American Midwest. Her father was a military engineer during World War I,[2] who taught at the University of Wisconsin[3][4] and the University of California,[5] and wrote a manual for tractor engine maintenance.[6] She graduated from Lyons Township High School in Illinois, and studied dance with Michel Fokine and other Russian dancers.[7][8]

Zarina danced with the Chicago Opera Civic Ballet as a young woman,[9][10] and gave dance recitals for community groups in the midwest.[11][12] She appeared as a dancer in films Morning Judge (1926) and Chucho el Roto (1934). In 1935, she made her New York debut at the Guild Theatre, in a program of regional Mexican and "interpretive" dances with elaborate costumes.[13]

She traveled in Mexico[14] and many Asian countries[15][16] during the 1930s and 1940s, studying, performing, and teaching traditional dances.[9][17] She studied with Matsumoto Kōshirō VII in Japan.[18] For a time, when her travels were restricted during World War II,[7] she taught dance to the daughter of the Shah of Iran.[19][20] While in Iran, she worked with a fellow American expatriate, Nilla Cram Cook, who held a high position in Iran's Ministry of Education.[21]

An illustration depicting Zarina by Magda Nachman[22] was published in Dance Magazine in 1952.[1] She was on the program at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in 1955.[23][24] She wrote a book, Classic Dances of the Orient (1967),[25] with "particularly extensive treatments of the Indian Bhurat Natyam and the Japanese Nihan Buyo."[26]

Zarina died in 1967, in her sixties, in Mexico City. Her brother Gordon Zimmerman wrote about her life for an Illinois newspaper after her death.[7]

• Xenia Zarina at IMDb
• Xenia Zarina at the British Film Institute
• Photographs of Xenia Zarina in various dance poses and costumes, at Mediateca IMAH.