Born in Texas in 1918, Janet Leach was an influential American studio potter who trained as a sculptor in New York before turning to ceramics in the late 1940s. Meeting Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada at Black Mountain College in North Carolina led her to study traditional pottery techniques in Japan—making her one of the first Western studio potters to do so. After returning to the US, she married Leach in 1955, and the couple soon relocated to St Ives, Cornwall, to run the Leach Pottery.

Strongly influenced by her time with Hamada, whom she considered her primary mentor, she had developed a bold and energetic style, quite different from the studio's more restrained aesthetic. Her work, distinguished by dramatic red and black clay bodies and white glazes, was celebrated in a major retrospective at Tate St Ives in 2006-07.