Luisa Lang Owen
- Published: April 2, 2026
Luisa Lang Owen, Ph.D. passed away peacefully on Tuesday, March 3, in hospital. She was an accomplished artist, writer, poet, philosopher, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, and was brilliantly funny.
She was born in a small village in the former Yugoslavia, now Serbia, in 1935. At 9 years old, toward the end of WWII, she was placed into a concentration camp as a part of ethnic cleansing carried out against the ethnic Germans and other groups that had lived peacefully in the area for hundreds of years. Luisa relied on her resourcefulness to live through what only one out of 10 of camp occupants survived. She came to this country years later, alone at 15 years old, having to leave her parents and speaking no English. Her parents joined her two years later after she wrote Ohio’s Gov. Taft repeatedly to allow them in.
After high school, she won a scholarship to the Art Academy in Cincinnati, where she excelled in drawing, painting and fabric arts. It was there that she met fellow artist Glenn Owen, her first and only husband. After marriage, they lived with her parents in Cincinnati and had their only son, Erik. They embraced the artist’s lifestyle, making conversations around the philosophy of art and its importance, moved to an artist colony in Woodstock, New York, and was known to her friends at the time as Mrs. “Art.”
The family moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio, when Glenn got a job as the Yellow Springs High School art teacher in 1962. By the mid-’70s, she divorced and received her Master’s in Education from Wright State University, where she became a professor of art education and aesthetics. Later, she went on to get her Ph.D. from Ohio State University. Her sensuous fabric collages (“stitcheries,” as she called them) were shown across the country and in Europe as part of an International Fabric Artists exposition.
In the ‘90s, she began to write her memoir as a little girl in the death camp. “Casualty of War, a Childhood Remembered,” was published by Texas A&M in the early 2000s and is still available to purchase in book stores and online. Luisa engaged in discussions about her book on NPR and on C-Span, and the book has also been translated and published in Serbo-Croatian.
Luisa published a book of poetry in German as well, titled “Des Bischofs Kleid” and beautifully illustrated by Robert Hammerstiel.
She spoke English, German, Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian languages fluently and sometimes, as her family remembers, all together in one sentence. She was a storyteller, a creative powerhouse and fearless in her convictions, able to see well beyond politics and absolutely brilliant in understanding and expressing nuance whether in life or art. We will all miss her every day.
A memorial service will be held at her house, 1490 Corry St., on Sunday, April 26, from 1–5 p.m.
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