Dancer. Shearer was a 1934 graduate of Skidmore College who danced with the Humphrey-Weidman dance group and became an assistant choreographer with Agnes de Mille. She first earned critical acclaim for her solo recital at Carnegie Hall in the 1940s. After abruptly leaving New York City and moving to Northbrook, IL she formed her own dance company in 1959 and established the Morrison-Shearer Foundation and Museum in 1989. (Among the collections there are films by Helen Balfour Morrison that document Shearer's fifteen choreographed works, her performances, and conversations with leading dance artists and critics of the mid-twentieth century.)Shearer became a dance critic for "Ballet Review" and wrote "Without Wings the Way Is Steep," a three-volume autobiography. The work has been described as "written with the unique flair and wisdom of a creative spirit who went her own way, developing into one of the innovators of the twentieth century." In her writings Shearer was able to express "a profound sense of being different and of being awakened from a slumber" during her college years. Early in her studies at Skidmore, Shearer wrote, "The passion that has so long possessed me of being different, of never really copying, of being independent, has mounted so high that it insists on my believing that [my emotions] were not intended to be expressed by any of the present existing arts, but could only be revealed to the world in a new form of art, a new language of expression." In the absence of a dance major at Skidmore, she studied drama and literature. By her senior year, she had decided she would be a creator in a field that combined dance and theater. She read everything she could on the subject and was particularly impressed by the writings of John Martin, who said, "The modern dance is not a technique; it is a point of view." For Shearer, it became an all-encompassing focus. In her letters she wrote that "A performance for me was a complete emptying out, [after which] I had to have time to recuperate in order to have the full amount to give the next time," she wrote. "This balance of emptying out and filling up again has stood me in good stead, so that I not only still feel like giving, but actually can give, to the world in general and certain individuals in particular."