Angela Ward
History Faculty, Director of Performing Arts

Angela Ward

Angela is the Arts Director at Pacifica and she also teaches Theatre classes and U.S. History. She is bi-vocational and has integrated and intertwined her love of Shakespeare and all things theatre with her love of God, family, country, and U.S. History.

She began her career as a professional actress in New York performing various roles across the Eastern Seaboard studying at the Michael Chekov Acting Studio New York, Playwrights Horizons Theatre School, New York, and the Royal National Theatre in London. She is still a member of Actor’s Equity, but when she began the role of a lifetime as Mother, she shifted her focus to that of teacher which has served her, her husband, and her six children quite well over the years.

Angela, a life-long learner, has a bachelor’s degree from Auburn University and a Master of Fine Arts in Theatre from the University of Tennessee. In 2018 she was selected as a James Madison Fellow for the state of California. The Madison fellowship was established by Congress in 1986 for the purpose of improving teaching about the United States Constitution in secondary schools – Angela has been a U. S. History teacher for ten years, speaking at conferences and writing curriculum. She is on schedule to graduate with a Master’s in American History and Government from Ashland University in 2021.

Angela has been a conference speaker presenting Shakespeare and the Constitution, Cross-Curriculum Application of the Arts, and Shakespeare in the 21st Century for both English and ESL classrooms. She has also participated in various programs from the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge including the Medal of Honor Legacy, and she is a member of the Teacher Council for the Bill of Rights Institute. Angela uses her love of Shakespeare to introduce students to the primary source documents instrumental to the founding of the United States because, as De Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, the two books found on every pioneer bookshelf were Shakespeare, and the Bible.

She loves to write and the two articles of which she is proud are “Frederick Douglass, William Shakespeare, and English Language Learners” published by the Folger Shakespeare Library, and “Symbols of the Sacred: Religious Tension in Act l, Scene l of Romeo and Juliet” in the Literature and Theology Journal of Oxford University Press.

Angela loves fitness and taught group exercise for 33 years. She has been gratefully married to Bob for 34 years.