Jeanne Beaman

Jeanne Beaman

Jeanne Hays Beaman (October 7, 1919 – February 12, 2020) was an American pioneer of computational choreography, creating the piece Random Dances in 1964 by using an IBM 7070 computer to select and order movement instructions from three lists.

Her 1965 article, "Computer Dance", was widely cited by later practitioners, as was a 1968 exhibition of her process at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

She was adopted in 1919 by Nora Christine Schad and Joseph Allen Hays, who lived in Berkeley, California. Both were children of Missouri farmers, and both migrated to California together in 1906, arriving just after the San Francisco earth quake. Jeanne's adopted mother was a dance lover and linked up with Valerie Quandt, a dance teacher in Berkeley. Jeanne Hays' dance career began as "Baby Jeanne Hays" in Berkeley. At age 16, she went alone to New York to train at the School of American Ballet. She took extensive notes on her classes, including one by "Mr. Balanchine". Later, she attended classes at Bennington College where she studied, inter alia, with Martha Graham. Back in California, she studied at the University of California (Berkeley) and, following graduation, at Mills College. At this time she was a member of the San Francisco Opera ballet. She danced and taught in California, including at the University of California/Riverside, until she moved with her family to Pittsburgh, where she began teaching at Chatham College (now Chatham University), and then at the University of Pittsburgh, where she taught from 1961-1974 and became Professor Emeritus. She lived thereafter in Rockport, Massachusetts, where she was active in the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and other organizations. She died in Bernalillo New Mexico in 2020.