Anthropologist; student of the Kiowa and Blackfoot Indians, and of the people of Thailand.

Jane Richardson was born on August 2, 1908, in Berkeley, California, where she grew up in a University affiliated family, exposed to a wide variety of subjects, people, and countries. As a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, working with anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie, Jane Richardson was selected to participate in a field expedition to study the Kiowa in Oklahoma during the summer of 1935. Sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Laboratory of Anthropology at Santa Fe and led by Columbia University professor Alexander Lesser, Richardson joined four other graduate students on the expedition: Weston La Barre (Yale), Donald Collier (University of Chicago), William Bascom (Northwestern), and Bernard Mishkin (Columbia). She returned to Berkeley for two more years of graduate work and then headed to Columbia University where she wrote her dissertation on Kiowa law under Ruth Benedict. The dissertation was published in 1940 as "Law and Status Among the Kiowa Indians" in the Monographs of the American Ethnological Society, no. 1.

Richardson joined psychologist Abraham Maslow as a research assistant in 1938 to study the Blackfoot Indians. There she met another psychologist, Lucien M. Hanks, Jr., whom she subsequently married. The Hanks had three children and lived their lives at Bennington College in Vermont, and in Thailand, the subject of the remainder of Jane Richardson Hanks' published work. She resides in Bennington, Vermont.