As officers entered the MacKenzie Fine Arts Center, they heard another gunshot, Brighton said.
The man used a shotgun to kill the woman and then turned the gun on himself, he said.
Brighton declined to release their names but said they took at least one class together, which had met earlier in the day Friday.
The school, which has about 17,000 commuter students, sent alerts through an e-mail and cell phone system and locked down the campus, said Marjorie Swan, Henry Ford's vice president/controller.
"Nothing like this has ever occurred on campus," Swan said. She said the school west of Detroit wasn't as busy as usual because the shooting happened on Good Friday.
Christian Plonka, a 12-year-old who attends a theater program in the building, said he heard "one gunshot, and I saw someone getting pulled back into the room they were in."
Plonka and other students in the program ran into a parking lot at the adjacent University of Michigan-Dearborn campus, where they waited until police allowed them to leave.
Earlier Friday, a 19-year-old gunman wounded three people at a vocational training college in Athens, Greece, before killing himself, authorities said.
The shootings came a week after a man walked into the American Civic Association center in Binghamton, N.Y., and killed 14 people before turning the gun on himself.
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