Jane English, born 1942 in Massachusetts, is a photographer, artist, and author who holds a doctorate in particle physics and is also a licensed hot-air balloon pilot and amateur radio emergency communications volunteer. She has lived in California and Colorado, and currently resides in Vermont.

She is best known as co-creator of bestselling translations of the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi Inner Chapters, featuring her photography and design accompanying translation and calligraphy by Gia-Fu Feng, in the books Lao Tsu / Tao Te Ching, first published in 1972, and Chuang Tsu / Inner Chapters, first published in 1974, which she republished in several editions including gender-neutral versions in 2011 and 2014.

English has continued to create and publish books, wall calendars, notecards, art and more, exploring nature and consciousness through Eastern and indigenous thought, art, and traditions. Chungliang Al Huang has collaborated with her on several projects.

Jane English grew up in a small New England town, in a colonial house built in 1765. Her grandfather was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, her father was an electrical engineer, and her mother was a homemaker and avid gardener. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Mount Holyoke College in 1964, and began pursuing photography while at the graduate school of the University of Wisconsin–Madison where she completed a Ph.D. in particle physics in 1970.

In photography she was following in the footsteps of her grandfather, Walter H. James (1873-1965), her grandmother Ida Rachel Butterfield James (1875-1966), and her great-aunt Lucy Ardena Butterfield (1871-1955). Their black-and-white photographs of New England towns, landscapes, and farm scenes were on the walls of her childhood home. Their negatives are now in the collection of the University of New Hampshire library, and with her brother Ben English, Jr., she edited a two-volume collection of their photos and journals, Our Mountain Trips, Part 1: 1899–1908, published in 2005, and Our Mountain Trips, Part 2: 1909–1926, published in 2007.

In graduate school a boyfriend introduced her to darkroom techniques at the student union, and together they exhibited their photographs and sold prints at art shows. She chose to work in black-and-white images for many years. She later wrote that photography was a welcome alternative to her experiences in graduate physics departments and laboratories, where she was the only woman at the time. While in graduate school she also explored the works of Alan Watts and did an encounter group weekend, and sought answers to her questions about quantum physics and consciousness.

After completing her Ph.D. in 1970, she accepted a six-month postdoctoral appointment with the University of Wisconsin, working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory particle accelerator at the suggestion of a supportive professor who believed the Berkeley area was the right place to explore other paths. Six months later she declined an offer from Rutgers University for another postdoctoral position, preferring to stay in California, and instead decided to leave physics to focus on photography and further explore alternatives at a place called Stillpoint.

While working at Lawrence Lab she had been invited by her housemate and "landlady" to visit "a meditation place in Los Gatos". That turned out to be Stillpoint, an intentional community in the Santa Cruz Mountains where she met Gia-Fu Feng. Feng founded Stillpoint in 1966 as an unconventional Taoist meditation center and clothing-optional commune, where he led personal growth and community planning sessions using techniques based on Gestalt therapy and encounter groups.