Carol Lynn (1893-1987, born Carol Lynn Fetser) enjoyed a varied career as a dancer and educator, but she was best known for her association with Ted Shawn and the Jacob's Pillow ballet school. Born in 1893 in New York City, Lynn began childhood dance training at eight, studying folk dancing before the time of widespread ballet instruction in the United States. It was during a theatrical performance she attended with her mother when, seeing a dancer en pointe, Lynn's fascination with ballet began. She was sent to study ballet with the influential Madame Elisabetta Menzeli until the 1920s. Lynn then toured as a professional dancer with a small company that performed in vaudeville until the 1930s.

Lynn began training at the Denishawn School in 1922, where she studied dance with such teachers as Michel Fokine, Mikhail Mordkin, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn. By the 1930s, she became more involved at Jacob's Pillow by supervising the female students and administering the school. She was administrative director, along with Ted Shawn, of Jacob's Pillow University of Dance and Dance Festival from 1936 to 1960. During her tenure at the Pillow she was in charge of school activities and filmed the many artists performing, as well as Les Sylphides as performed by Ballet Theater and Giselle and Coppelia by Ballet Rambert.

In the 1920s and 1930s Lynn also taught at her own school in Baltimore, the Carol Lynn School of Dance. She and her advanced students danced annually at the Lyric Theatre for almost 10 years, and later at the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 1939, Lynn and Richard C. Lord Jr. choreographed the Carol Lynn Dancers in The Chemical Ballet at a concert for the 1939 meeting of the American Chemical Society in Baltimore. The show depicts a chemist who dreams a great experiment coming to life in the form of dancers representing atoms and molecules.

Lynn came to the Peabody Preparatory's Dance Department in 1947 at the request of Peabody Conservatory Director Reginald Stewart and the recommendation of Alice Garrett, a patron of the arts in Baltimore who had studied with Lynn and hosted her for many summers in the 1920s and 1930s at the Garretts' Evergreen Mansion. Lynn directed the Peabody Dance Department until her retirement in 1970. During her tenure, the program attracted visiting artists such as Shawn, St. Denis, Antony Tudor, and guests from the American Ballet Theatre. The department added modern dancer Dale Sehnert in 1955.

From the 1930s to 1950s Lynn filmed dance extensively, notably at Jacob's Pillow and for her own ballet school. These films are now divided between the Carol Lynn papers at the Peabody Institute's Arthur Friedheim Libraries and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Lynn died January 20, 1987, at the age of ninety-three.

Sources:
Guide to the Carol Lynn papers, https://archives.nypl.org/dan/19857. Last accessed February 6, 2023.
Kramer, Susan. "Carol Lynn, 1893-1987, dancer and educator extraordinaire." Available at http://www.susankramer.com/carollynn.html. Last accessed February 1, 2023.
Schaaf, Elizabeth. "Carol Lynn: Doyenne of Dance in Baltimore." Johns Hopkins Peabody News, February 1986.
Wallach, Rachel. "Raising the Barre." Peabody magazine, Spring 2015.