Along with her contemporaries Martha Graham and Katherine Dunham, Humphrey was one of the second generation modern dance pioneers who followed their forerunners – including Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn – in exploring the use of breath and developing techniques still taught today.

She was the daughter of Horace Buckingham Humphrey, a journalist and one-time hotel manager, and Julia Ellen Wells, who had trained as a concert pianist.

While still at high school she undertook a concert tour of the western states as a dancer, with her mother as accompanist, in a group sponsored by the Santa Fe Railroad for its Workman's Clubs.

[1] Partly due to financial concerns Humphrey opened her own dance school, with her mother as manager and pianist, in 1913 at the age of 18.

In 1917, at the instigation of Mary Wood Hinman, she moved to California and entered the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts where she studied, performed, taught classes and learned choreography.

Humphrey and Graham separately developed new ideas about the core dynamics of dance movement that eventually formed the basis of each of their techniques.

[3] Humphrey's theory explored the nuances of the human body's responses to gravity, embodied in her principle of "fall and recovery".

Through the fall and recovery principle, Humphrey is able to illustrate emotional and physical climax of struggling for stability and submitting to the laws of gravity.

[3] Her choreography from these early years includes Air for the G String, Water Study, Life of the Bee, Two Ecstatic Themes, and The Shakers.

[3] The Humphrey-Weidman Company was successful even in the Great Depression, touring America and developing new styles and new works based not on old tales but on current events and concerns.

[3] One of her last pieces, Dawn in New York, showed the strengths Humphrey demonstrated throughout her career – her mastery of the intricacies of large groups and her emphasis on sculptural shapes.

This thought process translated into using dances as metaphors for human situations and working in mostly abstractions to represent specific characters, events, or ideas.

She wanted dance to be an art that could stand on its own without the need of music or emotion and concentrated on the formal elements of movement such as design, rhythm, and dynamics.

In Humphrey's choreography she incorporates shaking movements to represent their sexual repression as well as the idea of being shaken clean of sin.

A street in her home town of Oak Park is named for her paternal grandfather, the Reverend Simon James Humphrey.