Alumni Profiles
Anya Colloff ’89 and Emily Ditkovski ’97
“I try to re-create that sense of connection wherever I go. It’s shaped how I build relationships, how I raise my kids and how I see the world.”
Sisters Emily and Anya have carved distinct but equally meaningful paths since graduating from Crossroads. Emily lives in Ireland with her spouse and three children. She is an educator who uses theater as a tool for building more equitable and compassionate societies. She’s also pursuing a Ph.D., studying the connection between educational theater and social change. Anya lives in LA with her fiance and their two dogs. She is a casting director, working in film and television while mentoring emerging talent and practicing energy healing in her spare time.
The sisters are deeply grounded in the Crossroads values that shaped them from a young age. Emily recalled, “In second grade, we learned about warm fuzzies and cold pricklies. We passed the talking stick. It was a place where we didn’t just learn facts—we embodied learning and practiced compassion.”
Anya vividly remembers meditating in kindergarten: “That was unheard of in the ’70s. I didn’t realize how different our education was until I talked to friends who didn’t have anything close to that kind of emotional awareness [at that age]. Crossroads helped us build an emotional vocabulary, and that’s rare.”
Both credit the Crossroads Drama Department—and their parents, instructors David and Delle Colloff, who were instrumental in building the program—with sparking their creativity. For Anya, producing student-written one-act plays cemented her love for collaboration and storytelling. Emily experienced the emotional impact of theater firsthand while performing in “Our Town,” and realized “This could be a path—working with communities to heal through drama.”
The sisters’ Crossroads education also inspired a lifelong commitment to service. “It wasn’t just about doing well—it was about doing good,” Anya explained. “That’s stayed with me.”
Emily and Anya still hold the Crossroads community close. “Even now,” Emily said, “I try to re-create that sense of connection wherever I go. It’s shaped how I build relationships, how I raise my kids and how I see the world.” For both, Crossroads and the faculty were their family.
The sisters are deeply grounded in the Crossroads values that shaped them from a young age. Emily recalled, “In second grade, we learned about warm fuzzies and cold pricklies. We passed the talking stick. It was a place where we didn’t just learn facts—we embodied learning and practiced compassion.”
Anya vividly remembers meditating in kindergarten: “That was unheard of in the ’70s. I didn’t realize how different our education was until I talked to friends who didn’t have anything close to that kind of emotional awareness [at that age]. Crossroads helped us build an emotional vocabulary, and that’s rare.”
Both credit the Crossroads Drama Department—and their parents, instructors David and Delle Colloff, who were instrumental in building the program—with sparking their creativity. For Anya, producing student-written one-act plays cemented her love for collaboration and storytelling. Emily experienced the emotional impact of theater firsthand while performing in “Our Town,” and realized “This could be a path—working with communities to heal through drama.”
The sisters’ Crossroads education also inspired a lifelong commitment to service. “It wasn’t just about doing well—it was about doing good,” Anya explained. “That’s stayed with me.”
Emily and Anya still hold the Crossroads community close. “Even now,” Emily said, “I try to re-create that sense of connection wherever I go. It’s shaped how I build relationships, how I raise my kids and how I see the world.” For both, Crossroads and the faculty were their family.
