February 8, 2011

We are happy to welcome back to Drexel Louisa Hanshew, our new Assistant Dean, working on our fund raising initiatives. Louisa has been the Senior Vice President of Development of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) since 2006. At PAFA, she played a major role in the $68 million campaign that kept Thomas Eakins' masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, in Philadelphia. She also secured a seven figure gift to name the lobby of PAFA's Hamilton Building. In the ten years prior to PAFA, Louisa ran her own development and event management consulting firm whose clients included Cirque du Soleil, the First Robotics Competitions and Drexel University. Before that, Louisa worked for The Devereaux Foundation, the Methodist Hospital Foundation, the Pennsylvania Ballet and the Albert Einstein Healthcare Foundation. This marks a return home for Louisa, as she is a Drexel alum who worked for the University in the 1980's as Director of Individual Giving, Director of Annual Giving, Assistant Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations, as well as coordinating the celebration of Drexel's Centennial. Her fondest memory of being a Drexel student was having the opportunity of working for fashion icon Emilio Pucci in Florence, Italy.

She worked with the governments of Italy and England on consulting projects, including work with Buckingham Palace and the Duke of York. When Louisa isn't consulting for foreign governments or heading multimillion dollar fundraising campaigns, she likes to collect Victorian jewelry. Louisa finished her Masters in Management in 2010 and completed her dissertation on AVON, Inc. Please join us in welcoming Louisa back to Drexel and please reach out to her at Louisa@drexel.edu if you'd like to explore the possibility of supporting our capital campaign for the URBN Center or other ways to support the Westphal College's students, faculty and programs.