Soares, Janet Mansfield

Janet Mansfield Soares is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and author. She received her training from the Juilliard Dance division in 1962, studying under Martha Hill. She danced with the Juilliard Dance Theater, joining Juilliard as part of the dance composition faculty upon graduation. During her career she has worked as a professional choreographer while assisting the director of Barnard's Minor Lathram Playhouse and collaborated on many productions at Lincoln Center, including pieces for the Little Orchestra Society. She also founded Dance Advance, a group for advanced students studying at Connecticut College School of the Dance. While working at Juilliard, she joined the faculty of Barnard College in 1963. In 1967, she began a concert series at Barnard called Dance Uptown, which was the precursor of the Barnard Dance Department, established in 1986.

Soares was also a member of the José Limón dance company and, in 1975, established her own company, DANCES/Janet Soares for which she danced and choreographed original works. She maintained the company until 1995. Works by Soares include Pomona (1988), For Six (1997) and Blue Skies (2002) among many others. In 1997, she began teaching History of Dance in Relation to Music at the Manhattan School of Music. She holds a doctorate from Columbia University in Arts in Education and is the author of Louis Horst: Musician in a Dancer's World (1992) and Martha Hill and the Making of American Dance (2009). She is currently professor emerita of dance at Barnard College, Columbia University, and lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Lyme, Connecticut.

From the guide to the Janet Mansfield Soares papers, 1954-2001, (The New York Public Library. Jerome Robbins Dance Division.)