Jana Herzen

Her parents were university professors Leonard Herzenberg and Leonore Herzenberg, and she was raised on the campus of Stanford University. She attended Stanford from 1977 to 1979, and New York University (NYU) from 1980 to 1982, where she completed an undergraduate degree in drama. While at NYU, she met Bernard Telsey and Robert LuPone, and together with five other NYU graduates, they founded the theatre production group Manhattan Class Company, for which she served as a dramaturg, script doctor, lighting designer, actor, and director for 10 years. In 1991, she left Manhattan to travel to Japan, Bali, and Australia where she worked on songs for her first album, which was eventually recorded in San Francisco and Paris from 1994 to 1997, and produced by Congolese worldbeat bassist and producer Shaka Ra Mutela.

Jana Herzen (born April 24, 1959 in San Francisco), is a singer-songwriter with folk, world, rock and jazz influences who founded Motéma Music, a Harlem-based record label focused on virtuosic jazz and world music. Prior to founding the label in 2003, she worked as a musician (her CD, Soup's on Fire, was the first CD on the label) and as an art agent for Winston Smith, who designed the logo for Motéma. Herzen was instrumental in the publishing of Artcrime, Smith's 2nd volume of collected works on the Last Gasp publishing imprint.