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Jane Brown ’41

A picture of Jane Brown

Jane Marie Townsend Brown ’41, July 2, 2006, in Oakland, California. Jane entered Reed after completing a summer session at Mills College on a dance scholarship. She attended Reed for two years, leaving in 1939, after her marriage to Carter A. Brown ’37, to live in Los Angeles. When Carter enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, the couple moved to New York City. Throughout the ’40s, Jane studied dance and choreography with such notables as Martha Graham and Louis Horst, and performed in many venues. 1n 1945, she began working with Milton Feher, her mentor in the field of dance therapy, and she helped found the Harlem Unity Theater. In the early ’50s, the couple and their two children returned to California. In the ’60s through the ’80s, she taught classical dance technique, incorporating the Milton Feher Method of movement awareness and her own work, Evolutionary Motion Studies, to bring to her students a joyful approach to dance as art and as therapy. In the composition of her choreography, she utilized themes of racial equality and jazz, dance and music history, and biology and evolution. In the early ’90s, her solo performance piece, Medea, explored her passions for gender equality, myth, and classical history. She suffered a stroke in 1996, which limited her work, but did not defeat her determination to rehabilitate her health and to teach. Survivors include her son, Peter Brown ’72, and daughter, and five grandchildren. Carter died in 2002.

Appeared in Reed magazine: February 2007

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