Papers of Jackie Braun, 1963-1986

Ruth Emerson (Jackman) Knight Braun, (known as Jackie) was born in Peabody, Massachusetts in 1898. She prepared for college at Salem High and at the State Normal School, Salem. At Radcliffe she concentrated in Fine Arts and Design and graduated with an A.B. in 1927. During the summer of 1926, she worked as a teacher of stage design at Middlebury College in Vermont. From 1927 to 1930 she worked as a Broadway stage designer and after studying at the Yale School of Drama, (1931), became the Executive Director of the Dance Repertory Theatre in New York City. Later she ran her own interior decorating business under the professional name of Jacqueline Knight and was business manager for photographer Lee Miller Penrose. In 1959, her designing skills found a new outlet when she purchased and restored a colonial mansion in Kingston, Rhode Island.

Braun returned to Radcliffe to teach art in 1967. In the 1970s, these classes came under the sponsorship of the Office for the Arts. She continued to teach these classes until 1986. She led similar workshops each winter on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies. She was awarded the Josephine Baker Humanitarian Award in 1986 for this work.

She married Jan Vink after her first husband died; and later, Konrad F. Braun, who died in 1965. Braun died while vacationing in Switzerland on July 20, 1990, at the age of 92.