Jane Sherman

Jane Sherman (June 14, 1908 – March 16, 2010) was an American dancer, writer, composer, and performer whose career spanned modern dance, Broadway, and editorial work. Born in Beloit, Wisconsin, to Horace Humphrey Sherman, an advertising writer, and Florentine St. Clair, an opera singer, she moved with her family to New York City in 1921. It was there that a St. Denis program featuring "Brahms Waltz and Liebesträume" prompted her to begin formal dance training at the New York Denishawn School, the institution founded by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in 1915. Sherman went on to become both a member and a recognized authority on Denishawn.

Her performing career brought her into contact with a wide range of dance and theatrical contexts. Between 1927 and 1928 she toured with the Ziegfeld Follies, and in 1928 she joined the Humphrey-Weidman Company as a member of its modern dance ensemble. That same period marked her Broadway debut, and she appeared on Broadway from 1928 to 1930 in the revue Garrick Gaieties and the musical Hello, Daddy. In 1934 and 1935 she danced as a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall, performing with the venue's celebrated in-house dance troupe.

Following the conclusion of her dance career, Sherman transitioned into publishing, working as a fiction editor at Seventeen magazine during the 1940s. In 1940 she married Ned Lehac, a high school science teacher who also worked as a composer and lyricist, contributing material to fourteen shows between 1930 and 1942. In the 1990s the couple relocated to the Lillian Booth Actors Home, operated by the Actors Fund, where Lehac died in 1999 at the age of 99. Sherman began publishing poetry in 2003, collecting her work into small self-published volumes, including Songs of Senescence, which addressed the subject of aging. She died on March 16, 2010, at the age of 101.