Ms. Raye Virginia Allen

Austin, TX

Honorary Advisory Council member

Raye Virginia Allen graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in the Plan II Honors program and an M.A. in American Studies. Among her achievements in civic leadership, Ms. Allen served as co-founder and president of the Cultural Activities Center in Temple, Texas—an early arts council formed in the 1950s; as a gubernatorial appointee on the Texas Commission for the American Revolution Bicentennial in 1971; as a founding trustee of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in 1975; and as the founder of the Friars Creek Preserve, Green Oaks, and natural heritage sites. 

Ms. Allen placed her own papers at the Briscoe Center. She assisted the university with placing the Gordon Conway archive at the Harry Ransom Center on campus and wrote the award-winning biography Gordon Conway: Fashioning a New Woman (UT Press, 1997). She has also donated textiles to UT’s human ecology department. 

A Life Member of the Texas Exes, Ms. Allen and her husband, the late H. K. Allen, raised a multi-generational Longhorn family with three children, five grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.