Jeffry, Alix, 1929-1993

Alix Jeffry was born in July 1929 in DuQuoin, Illinois (nee Evelyn Fish). After moving to Chicago she joined an organization of young celebrity hunters whose purpose was to photograph celebrities. She met Lena Horne, who encouraged her to enter the field of photography professionally. She opened a studio for theatrical photography in Chicago in November, 1950 under the name Alix Jeffry.

Jeffry moved to New York in 1952 and began documenting off-Broadway theater and performers. Beginning with the Originals Only group, she worked for Artists Theatre and then for companies such as Living Theatre, Terry Hayden's DeLys Theatre, and the New York City Center. Much of her work in the 1950s and 1960s documents the work of Edward Albee, beginning with his off-Broadway career. During her career in New York she shot an estimated 40,000 photographs of off-Broadway plays, and starting in 1968, 20,000 celebrity portraits for the New York Times Arts and Leisure section.

Jeffry was the author of a children's play, "The inside out adventure," which was produced originally in New York City in 1961 by the American Theater for Children. Her photographs were featured in several publications, including Stephen E. Rubin's The new Met in profile (1974), Mary Henderson's Broadway ballyhoo: the American theater seen in posters, photographs, magazines, caricatures, and programs (1989), and Rogers and Hammerstein, by Ethan Mordden (1992).

In 1988 Jeffry moved with her partner, Mary Alice Morris, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she continued her work as a photographer of people involved in the performing arts. She died there in 1993.