Jane Lang

Graduating from Swarthmore College and the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania where she was a member of the Law Review, Jane began her career at Steptoe & Johnson. She was quickly promoted to partner, earning the distinction of first female partner in addition to being the youngest attorney promoted to partner. In 1979, she served as General Counsel for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development for two years, whereupon she returned to Steptoe & Johnson for five more years. In 1986, she left the firm to form Sprenger and Lang with her soon-to-be-husband Paul Sprenger, specializing in class-action suits involving civil rights. Aside from her many talents as a practicing attorney, Ms. Lang had always cultivated a passion for the Arts, and for this reason began to withdraw from practicing law in order to form a family foundation to promote the arts. This eventually led to the restoration of the Atlas Theater, and ultimately to the revitalization of an entire community in Northeast Washington DC, when she unveiled the non-profit center for performance arts, the Atlas Performing Arts Center. Her father, multimillionaire entrepreneur Eugene M. Lang, is a well-known East Coast philanthropist. The lifelong New Yorker, inspired by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., started the I Have a Dream Foundation in the 1980s, first promising a group of Harlem schoolchildren that he would finance their college tuition years down the road, as long as they did the work to get there. There are now thousands of “Dreamers,” even in the suburbs of Washington, where Eugene Lang’s friend Abe Pollin, the late owner of the Washington Wizards (then the Bullets), sponsored a class of his own. Lang and his wife, Theresa, raised Jane on the edge of New York City, in Jamaica, Queens. Theresa, who was Irish Catholic, devoted most of her life to improving health care in the borough where she had grown up. Until her death in 2008, she maintained a deep relationship with New York Hospital Queens. Eugene, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Hungary, became an entrepreneur, starting his own business in the then-esoteric field of technology transfer. (Now 95, he still lives in New York and suffers from dementia; Lang devotes a portion of her week to managing his care and oversees his foundation.) Lang, her husband and her father have poured a not-insubstantial sum into the Atlas, but Lang has made opportunities, too. The Atlas has hosted the music of wunderkind classical composer Nico Muhly, as well as one of the few performances of “Ten Freedom Summers,” jazz trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s groundbreaking song suite. There was a production of “Goodnight Moon” and a glam rock act from China. This year’s Intersections festival drew 12,000 people. Jane Lang’s husband, Paul C. Sprenger, who with his wife ran the Sprenger Lang Foundation, a nonprofit specializing in arts promotion, and who was a member of the board of directors of the Atlas Performing Arts Center, died on Dec. 29, 2014.