DIANA HELLER

HELLER--Diana Schubart Was a financial industry pioneer, one of the first to make her way in the largely male world of brokerage institutions. Her career as a portfolio manager began in the early 1970s, after a divorce in 1973, and continued into the 1990s. Earlier, she had had a career in modern dance. Her financial career began when she went to work for Kuhn Loeb & Co., after qualifying as a broker. When Kuhn Loeb merged with Lehman Brothers in 1977, she continued as the only female executive with the firm until, in 1981, shortly before the firm sold itself to the newly merged Shearson/American Express, she was recruited by Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. as a vice president. There she managed the investments of a number of high-profile accounts, among them Georgia O'Keeffe's, the wife of Mrs. Heller's great-uncle Alfred Sieglitz, the renowned photographer and art pioneer. She retired in 1991. Born in 1920 in New York City to Dorothy Obermeyer Schubart, an artist and interior decorator and close friend of O'Keeffe's, and William Howard Schubart, Diana Heller attended Greenwich Academy (Class of 1938) and Sarah Lawrence (1942) where she studied dance with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. After graduating, she served in the WAVES during World War II and then worked as a dance instructor at the Donald Sawyer Dance Studio in New York. She continued her own studies in ballet and tap, appearing in several Broadway shows including "The Merry Widow." "I danced so much," she said, "I'd have to walk down the stairs backward to keep my calf muscles from stiffening." Mrs. Heller's father was a world-renowned financial policy expert, first at the old Bank of Manhattan and, later, as a senior partner at Lazard Freres & Co. He was a participant in the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. Her only sibling, William Howard Schubart Jr., died in the Pacific Theater just before the end of World War II. She is survived by two sons from her 1956 marriage to Dr. Sidney Heller, Mark Heller, an executive coach and business strategist, and Jeffrey Heller, an executive director at Cushman Wakefield, and his wife Barbra Heller, a nutritionist. She is also survived by a nephew, William Howard Schubart III of Hinesburg, Vermont, and two grand-nephews, Peter Boynton Schubart, also of Vermont and William Howard Schubart IV of New York City.