Chicago-born dancer and choreographer Marion Scott studied with Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Helen Tamiris and Daniel Nagrin, José Limón, Hanya Holm, and Anna Sokolow. She performed in the companies of Graham and Humphrey-Weidman, and was a leading dancer in the Tamiris-Nagrin Dance Company from 1955-1965. She was a teaching assistant to both Humphrey and Tamiris, and, in 1963, was made a Doris Humphrey fellow at Connecticut College. In the late 1940's she began performing her own choreography and for 20 years headed her own company, working with dancers Cliff Keuter and Elina Mooney (Marion Scott Dance Trio) and Don Redlich. She was co-founder of Contemporary Dance Productions, an organization that help provide opportunities to young choreographers to present their work in jointly shared programs. In 1969, Scott, finding her movement severely impaired by hip problems, went to the University of California in Los Angeles where she was Professor of Dance and resident choreographer for the UCLA Dance Company. Hip-replacement surgery forced an end to her active performing. Nevertheless, in 1985, at age 62, she created a solo entitled Psalm 1984, which she performed with the UCLA Dance Company. In 2002 at the Japan America Center, she received the Dance Resource Center's Lestor Horton Lifetime Achievement Award.
From the guide to the Letters to Marion Scott, 1944-1963, (The New York Public Library. Jerome Robbins Dance Division.)
