Anne-Leslie Owens.jpg)
Public Service Coordinator
alowens@mtsu.edu
Anne-Leslie Owens joined the
MTSU Center for
Historic Preservation in
February 2001. As Public
Service Coordinator, she assists on survey and
documentation projects such as the Rural
African-American Churches Project and National
Register nominations, provides heritage
organizations with recommendations and interpretive
planning, oversees work on the Tennessee Civil War
National Heritage Area (TCWNHA) and
Center for Historic Preservation (CHP)
websites, and serves as a liaison to other national
and statewide preservation organizations.
Assisting organizations with their educational
outreach, Owens has served on the host committee for
the Alliance of National Heritage Area’s
International Heritage
Development Conference held in
downtown Nashville in June 2005 and the Conference
on African-American History and Culture held at
Tennessee State University in Nashville in February
2006.
Owens has been actively involved with the creation
of Tennessee's new statewide preservation non-profit
organization, the Tennessee Preservation Trust. As
TPT's board development chair, she helped to create
the first board of directors and advisory council.
She chaired Tennessee's 2nd annual preservation
conference, "Tennessee Tomorrow: Taking Preservation
into the 21st Century," held in Columbia, Tennessee,
in 2001. Now an ex officio member, she has served
as secretary and board development chair for the
Tennessee Preservation Trust.
A
native of Lexington, Kentucky, Owens holds a
bachelor's degree in interior design from the
University of Kentucky (1992) and a master of arts
degree in history and historic preservation from
Middle Tennessee State University (1995). Combining
interests in interior design and historic
preservation, Owens began documenting some of
Tennessee's most elaborate examples of decoratively
painted interiors. "The Decorative Painting
Tradition in Tennessee Interiors: 1830-1890," her
thesis, is a statewide survey of existing examples
of decoratively painted rooms.
She
has worked on numerous history and preservation
programs and publishing projects, both in Kentucky
and Tennessee. While in Kentucky, Owens worked for
the Perryville Enhancement Project, an effort to
interpret, develop, and protect the 3,500-acre
Perryville Battlefield Study Area. From 1995 to
1997, she coordinated the National Endowment for the
Humanities-funded "Eden of the West" reading and
discussion series. She was Assistant Editor for the
Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture,
published in 1999 by the Tennessee Historical
Society. Owens served on the staff of the
Metropolitan Historical Commission (MHC) in
Nashville prior to coming to work for the Center.
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