Indra Devi
Eugenie Peterson (, ; 22 May, 1899 – 25 April 2002), known as Indra Devi, was a pioneering teacher of yoga as exercise, and an early disciple of the "father of modern yoga", Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. She went to India in her twenties, becoming a film star there and acquiring the stage name Indra Devi. She was the first woman to study under the yoga guru Krishnamacharya at the Mysore Palace, alongside B.K.S Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois who went on to become yoga gurus. Moving to China, she taught the first yoga classes in that country at Madame Chiang Kai-shek's house. Her popularization of yoga in America through her many celebrity pupils in Hollywood, and her books advocating yoga for stress relief, earned her the nickname "first lady of yoga". Her biographer, Michelle Goldberg, wrote that Devi "planted the seeds for the yoga boom of the 1990s". Early years Eugenie "Zhenya" Peterson was born on 12 May 1899 in Riga in the Russian Empire (now Latvia), to Vasili Peterson, a Swedish bank director, and Aleksandra Labunskaya, a Russian noblewoman who acted at the Nezlobina Theatre. Eugenie was given a Russian Orthodox baptism. She went to high school in Saint Petersburg,