Ryan Bunch President of the International Wizard of Oz Club, joins TeslaCon to moderate book discussion panels about the book that started it all, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Thursday 11:30am) and The Patchwork Girl of Oz (Friday 2:30pm), which was chosen as a focus story for this 2026 convention. These interactive discussions will combine expertise from Oz Club members, with opportunity for audience discussion. Come expecting to hear what you already know and what you never knew
(He’ll also team up with Te Craft to present “Music Milestones in Oz,” but we’ll blog about that another time.)
Active in the Oz Club since he won his first Oz convention quiz at age 11, Ryan is an engaging and knowledgeable presenter on a wide range of Oz topics. He’s an academic writer who happens to know his way around a piano, so he’s often pressed into duty as accompanist for live music. He has performed for us as both actor and puppeteer. To stage his own puppet version of Buratino in the Emerald City, Ryan once made puppets, wrote music and songs, and performed in the show; the story was based on Leonid Vladimirsky’s obscure 1996 Russian children’s book that brought Pinocchio to Oz. More recently Ryan, with his husband Micah Mahjoubian, cochaired Oz: the National Convention 2016 in Philadelphia. That event found him partnering with local arts organizations for programming, and organizing tours that visited sites associated with Oz creators Ruth Plumly Thompson, John R. Neill, W.W. Denslow, Charles Santore, and Maxfield Parrish, and otherwise filling four days with Oz content for fans.
Ryan’s own book, Oz and the Musical: Performing the American Fairy Tale, was published by Oxford University Press in 2023, the same year he received his Ph.D. in the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers-University Camden. 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 productions, and the Land of Oz theme park on Beech Mountain, North Carolina.
Ryan received the L. Frank Baum Memorial Award in 2024. He currently teaches music studies at Temple University in Philadelphia.
