Sokei-an Shigetsu Sasaki (佐々木 指月 (曹渓庵); March 10, 1882 – May 17, 1945), born Yeita Sasaki (佐々木 栄多), was a Japanese Rinzai monk who founded the Buddhist Society of America (now the First Zen Institute of America) in New York City in 1930. Influential in the growth of Zen Buddhism in the United States, Sokei-an was one of the first Japanese masters to live and teach in America and the foremost purveyor in the U.S. of Direct Transmission. In 1944 he married American Ruth Fuller Everett. He died in May 1945 without leaving behind a Dharma heir. One of his better known students was Alan Watts, who studied under him briefly. Watts was a student of Sokei-an in the late 1930s.
Source: “Sokei-an”, English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), excerpt