Janet Darnell Leach (15 March 1918 – 12 September 1997), was an American studio potter working in later life at the Leach Pottery in St Ives, Cornwall, England. After studying pottery at Black Mountain, North Carolina under Shoji Hamada, she traveled to Japan to work with him. She studied with Hamada for two years and always considered him to be her principal mentor. She was the first foreign woman to study pottery in Japan and only the second westerner.
After returning to the US from Japan in 1955 she married Bernard Leach, the renowned British studio potter, whom she had earlier studied with. In 1956, she settled in Britain with Bernard Leach and together they ran the Leach Pottery in St. Ives, Cornwall. After Bernard Leach died in 1979, Janet continued potting, throwing individual pieces in a variety of clays and using different firing techniques. She exhibited widely and held regular one-person shows in England, USA and Japan. Her work can be found in many public collections in the UK and abroad. In 2006-2007 there was a major retrospective of her work at Tate St Ives