Elaine Summers has two identities: a respected choreographer coming out of the Judson Dance Theatre and a highly influential teacher of Kinetic Awareness, a system permitting an extraordinary range and ease of movement that has been studied by many people in the performing arts.

Summers began her dance training by studying ballet as a child. She attended the Massachusetts College of Art and, because degrees in dance were not offered at that time, studied to become an art teacher. She attributes her interest in the breakdown of forms into their component parts to her Bauhaus-oriented art training. During her sophomore year, she studied briefly with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham in New York. After graduating, she taught art for three years and then went to St. Louis where she taught dance to the mentally ill. In 1952 she came to New York to study dance at Juilliard.