Zoya Chernysheva graduated from the Pyotr Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory in 1946, completing two departments: organ (Professor Alexander Gedike) and piano (Professor Lev Oborin). As a first-year conservatory student, she won a competition and was accepted into the orchestra of the USSR Bolshoi Theatre as a pianist and organist, and two years later became an opera accompanist. She combined her work at the Bolshoi Theatre with work at All-Union Radio and Central Television as a freelance playwright for the music, drama, and children’s editorial departments. She also worked as a freelance author and director at the recording studio of the "Melodiya" label. Her first radio play and first television programme aired on 1 and 4 January 1958, respectively. After leaving the Bolshoi Theatre due to a “workplace injury,” as a number of sources note, she devoted herself to radio and television. She turned to theatre playwriting in 1972. The first stage production based on Zoya Chernysheva’s play "Indian Summer" was directed by Pavel Khomsky at the Mossovet Theatre. Zoya Chernysheva wrote a large number of television scripts, stage plays, and prose works, and was published in the magazines "Otchizna" and "Rabotnitsa". She regarded radio dramaturgy and radio theatre as her true calling and devoted more than 40 years of her life to it. In 1997, together with her husband Leonid Chernyshev, she founded the "Museum-Studio of Radio Theatre", which is currently a branch of the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum.