Barbara Winard

Barbara Winard was born and raised in Hillside, NJ. She received a bachelor’s in English literature and a masters in journalism, both from Boston University. When she was 55 she went back to school and earned a masters in gerontology from the University of Southern California. She’s always been interested in writing and the elderly. And now she’s one of them! Says Barbara —which mostly amuses and inspires her. She seems to be involved in the over 60 female travel cohort online. It’s a group that is growing quickly, inspired by dreams of bucket list travels after Covid, she adds.
Barbara was laid off from her 25+ year-job when she was 71---as senior editor for two online encyclopedias at Scholastic. Her fields as a writer and editor with the encyclopedia included fine and performing arts, literature, media, anthropology, archeology, and religion. She was previously a filmmaker and worked at WNET/13 public television in New York City. Her job was seasonal, and she traveled on down times—mostly alone and to Asia, Europe, and North and South America. When she returned from India one year, she called from a phone booth across from the Asia Society in New York and asked if they had work. They connected her with the head of the education department, who said that he’d like to talk to her about doing films for American children about Asian culture, and she told him that she was across the street. She ended up working for them, traveling for work in Asia, and running their film program.

She has also freelanced as a film producer/writer, working on films in and about Morocco, Indonesia, Lebanon, and other countries, performed adjunct work at several colleges when raising her children and worked at Grolier as a multimedia writer/producer, which eventually became Scholastic. After she was laid off 2.5 years ago, she started writing about her 50 years of travel—after never having written anything about herself her entire career. What an impressive career!