CAVE resident 2009-2010 and former American Dance Guild President Marilyn Danitz dies of a heart attack.
It is with a deep sense of shock and loss that we have to pass on the news that Marilynn died Monday May 24th at her home in Manhattan.

Her husband Richard Longman has written up a beautiful piece about her life that follows:
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A Brief Description of Marilynn Danitz
I consider her an amazing woman, someone who went after her passions, someone who thought big, thought way out of the box, and had copious amounts of drive and enthusiasm. When she died it was a particularly good time in her career. She had a very supportive group of dancers, she had been awarded a residency that gave her a place to rehearse regularly, always a dream of hers, and she had many irons in the fire. Maybe 6 weeks ago was an evening performance in Brooklyn, week before last she presented a paper at a UN conference on dance and other topics in Doha Qatar, this weekend after her death she has performances in an unusual space on 37th Street, and in 2 weeks her company is supposed to go to a dance festival in Sweden.

Like many people in the dance world, she knew at age 4 she wanted to dance, but dancing lessons seemed too expensive for her family. She majored in chemistry as an undergraduate, something that pleased her father. After completing the degree she went to Geneva Switzerland and started ballet lessons, got a gold medal of some kind, and shortly was a professional dancer in the Geneva ballet company. Later she was a professional dancer for the ballet company in Strasbourg France. After some dance accidents she came to New York City to do modern dance (normally ballet dancers build up their bodies for the special tasks of ballet starting at some very young age, instead of starting after a BS).

And simultaneously she did an MS degree in Chemical Engineering at Columbia doing a thesis on blood coagulation with Prof. Harry Gregor, and then did experiments on lung surfactants with Prof. Somasundaran, and continued to work on understanding the blood coagulation mechanism with Dr. George Wilner of the Columbia Medical School and then of Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. I believe she published two papers: one in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Pathology, and one in the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science. Som commented that she was one of his first graduate students and the “classical” paper they wrote on dynamic surface tension to simulate breathing is “still cited and not surpassed.”

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