Humphrey, Doris (1895–1958)

US choreographer, dancer, and teacher. She was one of the pioneers of modern dance. Her movement technique was based on the shifting imbalance of weight, either falling towards or recovering from two absolute positions – the upright or horizontal. Her works include The Shakers (1930), With My Red Fires (1936), and Day on Earth (1947). Her book The Art of Making Dances (1959) is still a highly regarded study on choreography.

A graduate of the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, Humphrey taught at Bennington College, Vermont, USA, from 1934 and at the Juilliard from 1952. As a teacher and theorist, she was responsible for codifying the radical ideas of the 1920s and 1930s into a usable vocabulary of movement and has influenced two generations of modern dance exponents.