Marian Hannah Winter

Winter was born in New York City, the daughter of Ernest Winter and Rose Rosenbluth Winter. Her father and maternal grandparents were all immigrants from central Europe; her mother was a policewoman[2] who collected theatrical sketches.[3]

She attended Radcliffe College.[4][5]

In 1939, Winter worked for the Federal Music Project in New York City, and assembled an exhibit on "Art Scores for Music" at the Brooklyn Museum,[6] called "the first international exhibition of scores for cabaret and concert hall music".[7]

In the 1940s, dance historian Lincoln Kirstein solicited Winter to write for Dance Index, a magazine he headed. In contrast to Kirstein's analytical or polemical approach to history, Winter was more of an archivist.[1] One of Winter's most influential works is "Juba and American Minstrelsy", published in 1947.[8] The article sketches the life of Master Juba, a black American dancer active in the mid-19th century. Winter argues that Juba introduced African elements to American dance forms and, in the process, created a new, distinctly American style. The article thus attempts to "[re-appropriate] for black culture what is otherwise generally seen as racist theft."[9]

Winter moved to France in her later years, where she worked as a translator and collected art and ephemera related to fairs and festivals.[3] There, she published The Theater of the Marvels in both English- and French-language editions.[10][11] She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974.[12] Of her 1974 book, The Pre-Romantic Ballet, one reviewer said that "Some historians have an ability to write about the remote past as if they were giving a first-hand account of personal experience. Marian Hannah Winter is one of them."[13]

• "American Theatrical Dancing from 1750 to 1800" (1938)[14]
• Art Scores for Music (1939)
• "The Function of Music in Sound Film" (1941)[15]
• "Augusta Maywood" (1943)[16]
• "Juba and American Minstrelsy" (1947)[17]
• The Theater of the Marvels (1964, with a preface by Marcel Marceau)[10]
• The Pre-Romantic ballet (1974)[18]

Winter used a wheelchair in her later years, to manage the effects of a progressive neurological condition.[3] She died in Paris.[1] There is a collection of her papers, including correspondence, notebooks, and photographs, at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.[19] The Marian Hannah Winter Professorship in Theatre and Dance Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was named in her memory. In 1985, items from her collection of fairground memorabilia were displayed at the Pusey Library in Cambridge.[3]