Labors of love

By Lillian Snortland

Nanny Lynn’s internet fame began with a series of sincere and uninhibited animations she created from scratch for her grandchildren in the early 1990s on her first computer, a Commodore Amiga. The tapes, time capsules of early animation totaling three hours, kept her grandchildren’s attention during playdates and while their mother prepared dinner. Lynn Ochberg ’64 learned 20 years later that a tech transcription store had made copies of her animations. The distributed copies became cult classics at parties and other casual viewings and were recently shown at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October.

The first book Ochberg ever read was James Matthew Barrie’s Peter Pan; with her own Wendy-like maternal instinct, Ochberg excels at uplifting children’s imaginations. Using her skills as a code programmer to memorialize her grandchildren’s interests, Ochberg worked every machine, created the sounds, and narrated her stories about dinosaurs with feather hats, wild princesses time traveling, tiny boys born of antibiotics guiding cockroaches through the kitchen pipes, and more. The Brooklyn Academy of Music described the Nanny Lynn films as “bewitchingly sincere, surreal works” and as having inspired a generation of animators.

Ochberg has dived into the world around her headlong and headfirst. She always knew that after motherhood, she would return to public service. After graduating from Goucher with a degree in fine arts, she completed a law degree from Georgetown and later served various roles in her town in Michigan, including town trustee, Planning Commission chair, and Board of Appeals chair, for the next 40 years.

A self-proclaimed “education-nut,” Ochberg attended Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Goucher, Georgetown, and Stanford Law. Ochberg commends Gretel Chapman, her art history professor at Goucher, for teaching her the significance of primary sources. “I went on to law school and interviewed professors for journalistic publications. And in every job I’ve done in public service, this helped ensure all my judicial decisions had the appropriate amount of data behind them.”

“I think I’ve listened to every history book Audible.com offers while doing my projects,” Ochberg jokes. “Get as much education as you can, whenever you can.” In 1984, Ochberg participated in a Michigan State summer program for lifelong learners in China, where she practiced Mandarin and developed an appreciation for silk embroidery. Ochberg went on to create silk embroidery of Christine Blasey Ford in the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee room, as well as several works depicting subjects rebuilding their lives after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

Now retired at age 81, Ochberg makes art every day and stays engaged with her community—her passion for silk embroidery endures, and she’s drawn portraits of fellow condominium unit owners, their pets, and their grandchildren. She also has an arrangement with a local veterinarian to make memorial portraits of their animal clients; through it all, Ochberg’s curiosity, and commemoration of the people around her, drive her delightful labors of love.