Barbara Louise Carlisle

Family-Placed Funeral Notice

BARBARA LOUISE CARLISLE Barbara Louise Carlisle died on Saturday, June 23, at her home in Lake Worth, Florida with her husband, daughter, and sister by her side. Barbara was a woman of exceptional intelligence and creativity and a great capacity for teaching, caring, and loving. She lived a splendid, luminous, even numinous, electrical life—a blessed life indeed. She will be mourned deeply and sorely missed by Fred, Andrea, and all of her family. Barbara was born Barbara Louise Saenger on May 7, 1938, in Columbus, Ohio where she graduated from North High School and The Ohio State University. She earned graduate degrees at Michigan State University (M.A.) and the University of Michigan (Ph.D.). She taught humanities, art history, and theatre arts at a number of universities, including Michigan State, Eastern Michigan University, and Virginia Tech. She retired from Virginia Tech as a department chair in 2001. She also served as Associate Dean of Fine Arts at Miami University in Ohio in the late 1980s. Barabra performed, choreographed, and directed both for professional and university theatres. She was a produced, award winning, playwright and a teacher of playwriting and acting. In the 1980s, Barbara was the producing director at the Boarshead Theatre in Michigan and later Literary Manager at the Cincinnati Playhouse—both Equity houses. Barbara also pursued a parallel career in the arts in education, serving as a consultant to teachers and schools in several states and working as a grantee for foundations such as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Kellogg Foundation. She served, as well, as the state Fine Arts Coordinator for the Michigan Department of Education. Barbara is the author of several books, among them hi concept-lo tech, a guide to making theatre for everyone, and most recently, a volume of her own plays and classical adaptations, The Louise Plays. In recent years, she turned to video production and editing and made several short films—one of them about the Lake Worth Street Painting Festival. Barbara is survived by her husband, Fred; daughter Andrea Rutledge; her brother, Fritz Saenger; sister Anne Franklin; her mother, Ruth Saenger, nieces, nephews, step-daughters, and their families. She will be memorialized at Evening Prayer service at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Lake Worth, Florida, at 5PM on Wednesday, June 27. Barbara's remains will be interred in Clover Hollow, a beautiful mountain valley in Virginia where she and Fred lived for a decade. Funeral arrangements entrusted to: Dorsey – E. Earl Smith Memory GardensLake Worth, FL (561) 964-3772. To express condolences and/or make donations Visit PalmBeachPost.com/obituaries