Franziska Marie Boas was born January 8, 1902 in New York City. She was the youngest of six children. Her parents were anthropologist Franz Boas and his wife Marie Krackowizer Boas. Franziska received her early education in Englewood, New Jersey public schools. She went on to earn her Bachelors degree in Zoology and Chemistry at Barnard College in 1923. Franziska later trained in dance with Bird Larson. She studied drawing and sculpture from 1923-24 at the Art Students League in New York with Robert Laurent and Boardman Robinson . In 1927, she was in Breslan, Germany to study dance with Mary Wigman. She returned to New York to study with Hanya Holm until 1933, serving also as Holm's assistant and percussionist. Franziska was married to Dr. Nicholas Michelson from 1928 until their divorce in 1942. Their daughter, Gertrud Marie, was born on June 16, 1929.
Like her father Franz, Franziska was an activist committed to the fight for racial equality and social justice. When she founded the Boas School of Dance in New York in 1933, it was a racially integrated school and she served at it's Director until 1949. Some of her more notable students were Katherine Dunham, Merce Cunningham, Claude Merchant, Alwin Nikolais, Norman Koker, Valerie Bettis, John Cage, and Ed Bates. The Boas Summer School of Dance, located on Lake George, was another interracial school that Franziska founded in 1944. During the time she was teaching at her own schools, she also spent time teaching at Bennington College, Columbia University Teachers College, Bryn Mawr College, The Savage School for Physical Education, The Horace Mann School, Walden School in New York, Colorado State Teachers College and Bank Street College.
During the 1940's Franziska worked as a volunteer with psychiatrist Lauretta Bender at Bellevue Hospital in New York, where Boas pioneered the use of dance therapy while working with schizophrenic children. In the early 1940's, she created the first all percussion orchestra in the West. Franziska continued her study of dance therapy at Bolton Music Festival, Stanford, the Menninger Institute, UCLA, Indiana University, Art Students League in New York, Wayne State University, and the New School for Social Research, among other institutions. She also attended meetings of the American Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation. While involved in that study, she found time to tour the United States, giving lectures on dance and doing dance and percussion performances.
In 1941, she published two very important journal articles on dance as therapy. "Creative Dance as Therapy" appeared in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism ran her article " Psychological Aspects in the Practice and Teaching of Dancing". Her most important work for dance ethnologists was The Function of Dance in Human Society, which was an edited volume from her seminar series.
Franziska left New York in 1950 and moved to Rome, Georgia, where she became the Head of the Dance and Physical Education Department at Shorter College. While in Rome, she became a part of the Southern Association for Health Physical Education and Recreation and she organized the Georgia Dance Association in 1955. The concept of culture in dance was introduced to her students at Shorter by Franziska as an important part of dance history. She contintued her activism by becoming a founding member of the Rome Council on Human Relations which was an organization working toward advancing integration.
Franziska moved to Sandisfield, Massachusetts after she retired from Shorter College in 1965. There she taught dance to the community residents and was an active member of the Sandisfield Arts Council. Franziska remained an active dancer until near the end of her life. After suffering for four years from Alzheimer's disease, Franziska Marie Boas died December 22, 1988 at her home in Sadisfield, Massachusetts at the age of 86. She was survived by her daughter, Gertrud Marie and her three granddaughters, Valerie, Carol, and Cindy Pinsky. Barnard College held a memorial service for Franziska on April 30, 1989. Franziska Boas is responsible for developing some of the sub-fields of dance that are still studied to this day. Her granddaughter Valerie Pinsky wrote in the obituary she wrote of her grandmother, Franziska:
"She will be remembered as a woman of extraordinary grace and vitality, whose life could not have been more rich, and whose sense of humor was never lost."
Fanger, Iris M. Dance Magazine, 28, (June, 1989)
Former Link, http://www.cas.usf.edu/anthropology/?women/boas/franziska_boa_ll.htm (Dec, 2001)
Garraty, John A. American National Biography, Vol. 13, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999
FranziFranziska Boas Collection 1920-1988. Dance Heritage Coalition. Accessed May 28, 2009. danceheritage.org
Written By: Leana Finger, 2001
Rewritten by: Lillian Dolentz, 2009