Eva Kollisch

Eva Kollisch (August 17, 1925 – October 10, 2023) was an Austrian-American lesbian rights activist and writer. She is best known for co-founding the pioneering Women's Studies department at Sarah Lawrence College, and her activist work in feminist, anti-war, and lesbian rights movements.

Early life Eva Maria Kollisch was born on August 17, 1925, in Vienna, Austria, to poet and journalist Margarete Kollisch and architect Otto Kollisch. Kollisch attended school in Baden until 1938, when the Nazi Party annexed Austria. She was briefly moved to a boarding school for Jewish girls in Vienna, until she and her brothers fled via the Kindertransport to England in 1939. She worked as a labor organizer for the party from 1941 to 1946, and moved to Manhattan and later Detroit after graduating high school to work on a Jeep assembly line.

In 1950, Kollisch married Gert Berliner, a German-born Abstract Expressionist artist. In the late 1970s, Kollisch served as the director of the Center for Continuing Education at Sarah Lawrence. She continued to write magazine articles and anthologies, and published two memoirs, Girl in Movement in 2000 and The Ground under My Feet in 2008.

In 1986, Kollisch's Sarah Lawrence colleague, Grace Paley, introduced her to Naomi Replansky at a Gay Women's Alternative poetry reading. They were married in 2009, and in 2016, the couple received the Clara Leimlich Social Activist Award from Labor Arts. Kollisch and Replansky lived together in Manhattan until Replansky's death in early 2023. Kollisch died from a chest infection on October 10, 2023, at the age of 98. Her archival papers are held in the Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History at Smith College.