Lilias Folan, who helped yoga evolve from the mysterious to the familiar in Middle America in the 1970s by hosting a television program that aired as a lead-in to “Sesame Street” on PBS, died on March 9 in Loveland, Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb. She was 90.
Her death, in an assisted-living facility, was confirmed by her son Matthew Folan.
Ms. Folan’s half-hour, weekday program, “Lilias, Yoga and You,” later called “Lilias!,” first appeared on WCET, Cincinnati’s public television station, in 1970, gained national distribution within a few years and continued into the 1990s, making yoga accessible to millions of viewers in their living rooms.
“Lots of kids rolled around on the floor alongside their moms as they waited for Kermit and Cookie Monster,” Cincinnati Magazine wrote in a profile of Ms. Folan that was published days before her death under the headline “America’s First Yoga Influencer.”
Ms. Folan was also described at times as “The First Lady of Yoga” and, given the PBS connection, “The Julia Child of Yoga.” She wore her hair in a side braid, donned bright leotards and spoke in a soothing, welcoming voice, helping to demystify a discipline that many Americans at the time viewed as a counterculture practice.
“Imagine a more flexible Mr. Rogers, wearing spandex instead of sweaters, speaking directly to the camera in calm, reassuring tones and checking in on viewers’ mental state like a caring Sunday school teacher,” Danielle Friedman, the author of “Let’s Get Physical” (2022), a book about the history of women and exercise, wrote of Ms. Folan in The New York Times in 2025.
Ms. Folan wrote books, had a newspaper column in The Cincinnati Enquirer, taught classes, recorded videotapes and appeared in brief, background scenes in the satirical 1979 movie “Being There.” Peter Sellers, playing a television-obsessed simpleton mistaken for a political sage, mimicked yoga postures and famously attempted a headstand on a bed, while Shirley MacLaine’s character performed her own rousing and limber maneuver on a bearskin rug.
The Times listed “Lilias, Yoga and You” 17th among the top 50 reasons viewers watched PBS during the network’s first half-century on the air.
“Before we had hot yoga, trampoline yoga and goat yoga tutorials at our fingertips, there was Lilias,” Jennifer Schuessler, a Times culture reporter, wrote in 2020. “Lilias Folan wasn’t the first to popularize yoga. But she was perhaps the first to bring the exotic-seeming practice into middle-American living rooms.”
Lilias Antoinette Moon was born on Jan. 13, 1936, into a wealthy family in Boston. Her father, Harold P. Moon, was an oil broker and mineral production executive with a background in aviation. Her mother, Norah (Goldsmith) Moon, was a socialite who volunteered for programs to rehabilitate disabled servicemen and to provide guide dogs for the blind.
In interviews, Lilias described an unsettled, painful childhood spent away from her parents at boarding schools, telling Cincinnati Magazine: “I was given away as a kid. They didn’t care.”
She developed an interest in art and photography, attended Bennington College in Vermont for two years and studied in Rome. In 1959, she married L. Robert Folan, a transportation executive. That childhood feeling of being unwanted “left a hole in her life that she filled with spirituality,” Matthew Folan said in an interview. “And that got her on the journey to yoga.”
After giving birth to Matthew and his older brother, Michael, in the early 1960s, she developed what she later realized was postpartum depression. She wrote in her book “Lilias, Yoga and Your Life” (1981) that she had everything but “was not happy.” She asked herself, “Why?”
When her doctor suggested exercise, she took a yoga class at the Y.W.C.A. in Stamford, Conn., near her home. As a result, she told Yoga Journal in 2023 she “stopped smoking, slept better and had more energy.”
She developed a sense of spiritual and physical awakening.
“The journey of yoga is a couple of hundred miles up a mountain, but it is a million miles inward,” Ms. Folan said in 2019 on the website 147 Stanley Street. “There is a lot more to yoga than a 10-minute headstand.”
After her husband was transferred to Cincinnati in 1968, Ms. Folan began teaching at a Y.M.C.A. there. The Beatles, among other celebrities, had begun to help popularize Eastern spirituality in the West. One of her yoga students, whose husband was the producer of a local children’s television program, suggested to him that Ms. Folan might make an inviting host for her own show.
At the time, Ms. Folan had been watching the author and teacher Richard Hittleman’s black-and-white program, “Yoga for Health,” produced out of California. It featured him and a female practitioner who demonstrated yoga postures. “I could do that better,” Ms. Folan said she recalled thinking to herself.
In addition to her sons, Ms. Folan is survived by a brother, Harold Hamilton; a half sister, Melinda Moon; and seven grandchildren. Her husband died in 2018.
At her show’s peak, in 1976-77, “Lilias, Yoga and You” aired on 190 stations across the country, according to a 1985 article in The Cincinnati Post, which described it “not so much an exercise show as a program about overall well-being.”
At one time, an autographed leotard of Ms. Folan’s hung in a Cincinnati sports bar, Matthew Folan said, next to the jerseys of the Cincinnati Reds baseball stars Pete Rose and Johnny Bench. She appeared on national talk and exercise shows and gave yoga lessons on cruises, including to the former first couple Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, who sent her a thank-you note.
“I had to look at fame and understand it,” Ms. Folan told Cincinnati Magazine. “I try to avoid the word proud. I’ve always known I was put on this planet to do this sharing and this journey. I learned to think of myself as an instrument.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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