Jane Ellen Perry

Jane Ellen Perry passed away on Wednesday morning, November 29, 2023, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was 66 years old. She had Alzheimer’s disease, which brought a quiet end to her adventurous life. 

Jane was born on January 17, 1957 in Tallahassee, Florida to Jim Perry and Betty Atwood of Winthrop and Malden, Massachusetts. At the time, Jim was serving in the Air Force, fulfilling his ROTC commitment right out of college. The family would settle in Reading, Massachusetts soon thereafter. 

Betty passed away in late 1962, ten months after Jane’s brother, Bob was born. Jim married Patricia Wimpress in October 1964 and Jane’s younger sister, Amy, was born just a year later, at the beginning of a journey that made Jane a world traveler from Massachusetts to California to Hong Kong to Okinawa and to Korea during her grade school years; then she was off to France and Germany as a college undergraduate.

Upon returning to the United States in the late ‘70s Jane would parlay her Theater Arts degree earned at Schiller International University in Strasbourg, France into a 17 year career mostly as a stage actress, but who also was creatively involved in other aspects to include directing.  Additionally, Jane was the co-founder of three theaters in Connecticut and Tennessee, as well as working as the assistant controller of Harvard’s American Repertory Theater and as interpreter for acclaimed American director Robert Wilson who took a new project to Germany in 1986 - a production she would also stage manage, earning her Actors’ Equity card in the process. 

Her love of working in theater would run its course by the early 1990s. At that time, Jane briefly considered a new career in spiritual studies. It was while traveling from Nashville to Berkeley, California where she intended to attend theological school that she discovered Santa Fe. Early on, Jane earned her masters degree at St John’s College majoring in Eastern Classics.  But for periods of travel in the years that followed, Jane would remain in Santa Fe for the rest of her life.

It was in Santa Fe that she met Frederick C. Liebler (A.K.A. Lee Liebler) in the late ‘90s, a man with whom Jane  shared many values and who kept pace with her as she pursued her new path which included wilderness training and the leading of vision quests, while learning and engaging in Native American spirituality, meditation, and perpetual self-inquiry.  Jane and Lee would become life partners in 2000. They officially married on their 15th anniversary in 2015.

Jane’s career path ultimately led her to becoming a certified personal coach. And that coaching practice would marry with her foreign language skills developed decades prior as she developed a mostly French coaching clientele worldwide in collaboration with Maud Séjournant’s program: “Le Cercle de Vie” (The Circle of Life).

Contemporaneously with her coaching work, Jane made one more serious professional commitment: Administrator and Personal Assistant to earthworks/land artist Nancy Holt, whom she served loyally from 2010 until two years beyond Nancy’s 2014 passing.

Jane’s Alzheimer’s first suggested itself in late 2016. But never - not once in the seven years that followed - did she complain, despair, or rage at the gradual unwinding of her intellect or mastery of or engagement with life. 

Jane Ellen Perry is survived by her husband, Lee, her brother and sister-in-law Bob and Geraldine Perry, her sister and brother-in-law Amy and Michael Cooke, her step-mother Pat Perry, her cousin Scott Perry and his wife Karen Perry, her cousin Elizabeth Perry and her husband Farley Duvall, and her aunt Lynne Perry Wells. 

There will be a memorial gathering for Jane in the Clubhouse at Dos Santos Condominiums, 2210 Miguel Chavez Rd in Santa Fe on Wednesday, January 17, 2024, from 6:00pm to 9:00pm.