Masha Archer

Masha Archer (born 1940) is a Ukrainian-American jewelry designer, belly dancer and entrepreneur.

Biography

Born in Kiev to a sculptor father and painter mother, Masha and her family fled the Soviet Union in 1942 and lived in an American displaced persons camp in Göttingen until 1949, when they emigrated to Philadelphia.

She studied graphic design at Pratt Institute in New York City, but left early to take a job as a restorer and exhibitor at the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico, hoping to eventually attend the art school there. She never matriculated, but met her future husband, art photographer Charles Homer Archer (1929-1993). Their first child, Maya, was born in Mexico. Living in Tucson and San Francisco in the 1960s, Masha redirected her arts training into clothing design, and became known for harmoniously mixing patterns and bright colors. In the seventies she studied belly dancing with Jamila Salimpour, and founded the San Francisco Classical Dance Troupe, developing and popularizing what came to be known as the American Tribal Style Belly Dance. One of her students, Carolina Nerriccio, went on to direct the successful Fat Chance Belly Dance troupe and school, also based in San Francisco.

In the early 1980s, Archer began her Art-to-Wear jewelry line. Combining her artist’s sense of color and an architect’s attentiveness to structure and function, she utilizes such materials as turquoise, coral, antique ivory, malachite, copal, jade, pearl, and petrified wood. Her husband, an alumnus of the fabled Black Mountain College in North Carolina, documented all her work in clothing, jewelry, and dance in a vast legacy of art photography until his death from cancer in 1993.

Persondata
NAME= Archer, Masha
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION= Ukrainian-American jewelry designer, entrepreneur, and belly dancer.
DATE OF BIRTH= 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH= Kiev, Ukraine
DATE OF DEATH=
PLACE OF DEATH=