Karen Sheingold

1942 - 2025

Karen Sheingold

Scarborough, ME - Karen Sheingold died unexpectedly on January 16th 2025 at age 82 of complications following open heart surgery to repair a defective mitral valve.

Karen Eisenberg was born in Hartford, CT, on October 21, 1942, to Philip Eisenberg and Helen Krasnow. Her early life was spent in Yonkers, NY with a short sojourn with her mother in San Diego after her parents divorced.

Karen got her BA in Sociology from Antioch College in the course of which she designed a unique program of study for a year she spent in India. She got her Ph.D in Developmental Psychology from Harvard. During that time she married Carl Sheingold. They had two children, Peter and David.

After graduation she briefly taught at SUNY Buffalo, Cornell, and Wellesley College. The family moved to Montclair, NJ and Karen commenced the first stage of her two part career, in educational research. She became Founding Director for the Center for Children and Technology at Bank Street College.

She and Carl divorced in 1991 and she moved to Princeton, where she became Director of the Center for Performance Assessment at ETS (Educational Testing Service). She left ETS in 1999 and became a freelance educational consultant.

Two developments changed the course of her later life. She became serious about yoga, which had been a longstanding interest, and launched her second career by undertaking a rigorous training program to become a yoga teacher. She incorporated several disciplines in a unique way and became a respected and beloved yoga teacher specializing in yoga for healthy aging.

In 2002 she met her late life partner, Michael Robbins, M.D., a psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Harvard who was then living in Amherst, MA. She moved from Princeton to Amherst and they lived near one another until 2023, when they moved into a cottage at Piper Shores, a CCRC near Portland Maine. She became a beloved presence there because of her optimistic, friendly, non-judgemental interest in others. She continued her yoga teaching, co-organized the first community Passover Seder, and at the time of her untimely death was a co-developer of a nascent political action for democracy program whose membership extends beyond Piper Shores. She loved gardening, biking and hiking.

Karen is survived by her partner, Michael, her sons Peter, age 54, and David, age 50, their respective spouses, Meredith and Gary, her sister Jean, and her beloved grandchild Aden, a junior at Wesleyan University.

The family is holding a private burial at Wildwood Cemetery in Amherst, MA. In lieu of flowers, please consider donating to a charity of your choice or to any of the following that Karen was passionate about: Antioch College, Planned Parenthood, Anti-Defamation League, League of Women Voters, and The Nature Conservancy.