From Wikipedia:
Helena Smith Dayton (1879–1960) was an American film maker, painter and sculptor working on the East Coast who used fledgling stop motion and clay animation techniques in the 1910s and 1920s, one of the first female animators to do so. Her work contributed to the release of one of the first stop motion films in 1917, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. She was also a journalist while living in Connecticut, and spent World War I in Paris working with the YMCA.