Jane Henson (1934–2013) co-created the Muppets with her husband Jim, performed alongside him from the beginning, and helped devise the technical methods that modern television puppetryTelevision puppetry is puppetry built and performed for a ca... More still runs on.
She was there first, in a sense
They met at the University of Maryland, where she was a senior and he was a freshman. She performed with him on Sam and Friends, the five-minute Washington television show that started everything in 1955, and the two formally founded Muppets, Inc. together in 1958.
The monitor was partly hers
Jane collaborated with Jim on several of the show’s technical innovations, including the use of television monitors to watch their performances in real time. That single technique is the foundation of every entry in this glossary about performing for a camera. It is not a footnote to the Muppets — it is the thing that separated them from everyone working before.
She ran the show
When Jim took a year off in the late 1950s to travel in Europe, Jane kept Sam and Friends going with the help of a classmate.
Why she gets written out
She stepped back from full-time performing in the early 1960s as the family grew, and the public story of the Muppets consolidated around one name. The origin is inaccurate without her, and the technical origin especially so.
Later work
She founded the Jim HensonJim Henson (1936–1990) was the puppeteer and filmmaker who... More Legacy in 1992 to preserve and present the history of the work, and supported puppetry through the Jane Henson Foundation.
If you perform to a monitorThe monitor is the screen a puppeteer watches while performi..., you are using something she helped work out in a Washington studio in the 1950s.