- In 1974, with $35,000 in start-up funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, Haag launched the Directing Workshop for Women with help from Tony Vellani, Joan Didion, Mathilde Krim, Eleanor Perry and others.
- In Los Angeles, Haag served as Film and Television Director for the John Tracy Clinic, where she directed a series of forty-two films, "Teaching Speech to the Profoundly Deaf," for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
- Haag's travel stories have appeared in four of the prize-winning Traveler's Tales series of books: India, A Woman's World, The Spiritual Gifts of Travel, and Spain.
- She was assigned to Paramount's Harold and Maude (1971), directed by Hal Ashby, then joined the AFI staff in 1971, and among her duties was to administer the nonprofit's film grant program funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
- Haag created 23 contemporary needlepoint canvases, working on some of these simultaneously, from 1975-2008. One took a decade to complete.
- She graduated from Seattle's Holy Names Academy, and went on to study art and painting at Burnley School for Professional Art.
- She wrote thousands of poems and gave poetry readings in theaters, museums, libraries, galleries, and private salons. A limited edition of "Amanita Caesarea", a legend, with original drawings by Roger Landry, was published by Gallery Plus in Los Angeles.
- Jan Haag also studied painting with Frederick E. Smith, dance with Eleanor King, and singing and tabla with Ali Akbar Khan and Swapan Chaudhuri.
- In 1992, during a writer's fellowship at Blue Mountain Center in New York, she completed No Palms, a California/Texas novel centering on water rights, real estate fraud, and murder.
- An accomplished painter and poet familiar with different mediums, Haag writes of the textile art medium: "Compared with the roughhouse immediacy of painting and sculpture, one can cite many a rug, tapestry, piece of stitchery which took a year to make or, at times, a decade. Back and back and back, millennia by millennia, the history and lore of weaving/stitchery recedes as we, at the near end of the time scale, proceed -- cloth, grid arts, fractals and computer -- into the future." These textile pieces became a life's work. Through determined experimentation and applying techniques and iconography learned from a lifetime of travel, including treks on foot alone through India, Korea, China, Thailand, Nepal, Russia and Europe, Haag would forever change the perceptions and possibilities of needlepoint. Leonore Tawney admired Haag's work and despite failing health traveled from New York to visit her exhibition at the Seattle Asian Art Museum.
- She studied art, painting, dance and law in schools around the country, then performed in regional theaters and directed plays.
- She walked alone through India, Korea, China, Thailand, Nepal, Russia and Europe, memorializing her travels in a series of free-form needlepoint diaries later exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum and international shows.
- Haag had directed dozens of educational films for the John Tracy Clinic and the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare when she became the first woman accepted into the Academy Intern Program at the AFI in 1970, three years after it was founded by George Stevens Jr.
- Haag has exhibited her work in West Coast museums, competitions, and galleries-including the Seattle Art Museum, the Frye Museum, the Otto Seligman Gallery, and the Woessner Gallery.
- Jan Haag wrote stories, novels, plays, film scripts, articles, essays, and a vast journal-the manuscripts of which are on deposit in Special Collections at the Blagg Huey Library of Texas Woman's University in Denton, TX.
- In Seattle, Haag managed poetry readings, an art gallery, and the Shakespeare Workshop for ABC Bookstore.
- Haag continued her studies at the Art Institute of Chicago, Reed College in Portland, Oregon, The New School for Social Research in New York, University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University, UCLA, and Southwestern University School of Law.
- In 1974, concerned that though many women acted in major motion pictures, almost none directed them. Jan Haag was determined to remedy this. She helped recruit Joan Didion, Mathilda Krim and other prominent women leaders to found a sustainable program to encourage and train women directors. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, she founded AFI's landmark Directing Workshop for Women. Understanding the power of celebrity, she encouraged accomplished women-including Joanne Woodward, Lee Grant, Margot Kidder, Ellen Burstyn, Maya Angelou, Karen Arthur, Anne Bancroft, Dyan Cannon, Julie Phillips, Kathleen Nolan, Cicely Tyson, Brianne Murphy, Nessa Hyams, and Randa Haines to sit in the director's chair for the first time.
- After 50 years of research and study, in 2009, Haag published Jocasta, an original play based on the Oedipus myth seen from Jocasta's point of view. Ascesis, a 600-page volume of poetry, was published in 2014.
- As an actress, she performed in regional theaters during the 1950s and 1960s, and directed plays in Washington, Oregon and California.
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