She spent a summer at Bennington College when it was a modern dance mecca, and then put in seven years of study and work in New York City with the likes of Doris Humphrey and Agnes de Mille.
An established celebrity-portrait photographer (Frank Lloyd Wright, Thornton Wilder, Bertrand Russell), Morrison became Shearer's lighting director, business manager, and adoptive mother.
She drew ideas and inspiration from a variety of artistic influences, including lengthy correspondence with choreographer and dancer Agnes de Mille[11] and writer Virginia Woolf.
It was drawn from handwritten copies she kept of nearly every letter she ever sent, together with criticism she wrote in her later years and Morrison's work, including a collection of films in which Shearer performs her own dances in front of a stationary camera in herlittle Northbrook studio.
[citation needed] Combining the technique of ballet and the freedom of modern dance, Shearer used a pointed or flexed foot, long extended limbs, and contorted shapes or straight lines of the body.
John Martin of The New York Times wrote that Shearer's appointment was the start of alliances formed between established artists and educational institutions.
[17] The Morrison-Shearer Foundation, established in 1991 and based at her home in Northbrook, Illinois, preserves the works related to the careers of photographer Helen Balfour Morrison[15] and Shearer.
[18] The Morrison-Shearer Foundation, which Shearer endowed after Morrison's death in 1984, maintains the Jens Jensen-landscaped Northbrook property and its buildings as an artists' retreat and archive.