Ned Wayburn, born Edward Claudius Weyburn, (March 30, 1874- September 2, 1942) was easily the most famous and influential choreographer in the early twentieth century. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia but spent much of his childhood in Chicago where he was introduced to theater and studied classical piano. At the age of 21, he abandoned his family?s tradition of manufacturing and began teaching at the Hart Conway School of Acting in Chicago. There he worked with three faculty members that directly influenced his growing interest in dance and movement: C.H. Jacobsen, Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery, and Ida Simpson-Serven whose teachings were based on Delsarte?s concepts about the meaning of gestures and their ability to communicate the emotion.
After leaving the school, Wayburn spent a great amount of his years starting out in theater staging shows for producers who had hired him. He worked with such teams as Oscar and William Hammerstein, and Marc Klaw and A.L. Erlanger. In 1906, he began his own management group called the Headline Vaudeville Production Company. Through his own firm he staged many feature acts, while collaborating with other producers such as Lew Fields, William Ziegfeld and the Shuberts. In 1915, he began working with Florenz Ziegfeld Jr, and created the incredibly successful, Ziegfeld Follies.
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