Paul Falcone, age 6, working on Underwater Creatures.

Expanding to venues outside of her home studio, Yvonne began teaching more involved classes at elementary schools and community centers, such as Project Incorporated in Cambridge. It was at the Newton Creative Arts Center, where she taught a six-week summer class, that Yvonne first met Amy Kravitz, one of several students who went on to careers in animation. Amy recalls, "When I was a child in her class, one of the most important things Yvonne did was take me seriously. She took all of us seriously. She was direct, contained, structured and responsible. She almost never praised us--she worked with us. She helped us make our ideas concrete, to make things happen. Yvonne has the magic ability to make learning exciting and gratifying."

Through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yvonne was soon traveling all over the country, offering three-month workshops in elementary schools, sometimes bringing a teaching assistant with her to stay on longer. In all, the films produced by Yvonne's young students have won more than 125 awards at international film festivals. In a review of a Yellow Ball retrospective screening in The Village Voice, Jonas Mekas said,&nbsp"The feeling that comes through, the amazing strength and directness with which children can catch a mood, a situation, their humor. Without any exaggeration, these are about the best animated films made anywhere today."

In 1985 and 1987, once Yvonne was teaching at the college level, she traveled to Armenia to work on a collaboration with an organization called International Artists for Peace. Sixty American artists and children were sent to the Soviet Union to create art projects in association with Armenian children and artists. The resulting projects were A Drop of Honey andThe Golden Ball, both short animated films based on Armenian folk tales.

While continuing with the classes for children, Yvonne began offering extended-period courses for adults. Once a month, she offered three day intensive adult workshops. "It started off with one person." recalls Anderson. "A woman from a university in Pennsylvania called up and asked for a private workshop." The rest is history. A wide variety of people came to the weekend workshops for a variety of reasons: teachers, librarians, people who worked in hospitals and maximum security reformatories, even people sent by the State Department from Nigeria. Each of them took with them an experience that they could then go and share with their own students. In this way, Yvonne educated a whole new generation of educators, many of whom are now teaching animation workshops of their own.

Rhode Island School of Design
In 1979, Yvonne was invited to teach animation part time at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), one of the premier art institutions in the country. "At first I didn't think too much about it," Yvonne said, "but then I realized it would present me with an opportunity to stay in one place for once, instead of being on the road all the time. So I did it." Five years later, she was brought on full time, and served as head of the Film and Video Department for nine years.

As in the Yellow Ball days, Yvonne expects a lot from her students, and she is recognized for her organized, almost militant teaching style. Even in her first introductory animation courses at RISD, she taught sophisticated filmmaking from day one, having her students make complete films, from A/B rolling and negative cutting to sound design and answer printing. Shortly after Yvonne started full time at RISD, Yvonne's former student/teaching assistant Amy Kravitz joined the department; by then, she was a CalArts graduate and award-winning independent filmmaker.

Today, RISD has one of the best fine art animation programs available, with Yvonne teaching Introduction to Animation, Puppet Animation and Special Effects courses, while Amy and her husband, Steve Subotnick, teach the advanced and degree project courses. Every year, a new generation of animators comes out of the program, armed with Yvonne's training and instilled with her love for the art of animation. She gives her students something to take with them. I should know . . . I'm one of them.