Background
Saeedpour was born Vera Marion Fine in Barre, Vermont on March 27, 1930, to Jewish immigrants from Russia. Her father sold scrap metal and rags for a living. She grew up in the only Jewish family in the town.
educator cultural organization administrator
Saeedpour was born Vera Marion Fine in Barre, Vermont on March 27, 1930, to Jewish immigrants from Russia. Her father sold scrap metal and rags for a living. She grew up in the only Jewish family in the town.
Bachelor magna cum laude, University Vermont, 1972. Master of Education, University Vermont, 1973. Doctor of Education, Columbia University, 1976.
She founded the Kurdish Heritage Foundation of America, the first library and museum in the United States dedicated to the subject. The foundation is located in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City. At age 17, she eloped with Marcel Beaudin and moved to Brooklyn, where she worked at a bakery.
She later spent eight years working as an assistant to New York City real estate developer Seymour Durst.
Their marriage ended in divorce. At age 40 she enrolled at the University of Vermont, where she earned a bachelor"s degree in sociology and a master"s degree in philosophy.
After her divorce from Beaudin, she enrolled at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she earned a Doctor of Philosophy in 1976. While at Columbia, she moved to an apartment in Harlem.
When her home was robbed, she called out to a man in an apartment across the street to ask if he had witnessed the burglary.
That man, Homayoun Saeedpour, a 26-year-old Kurd from Sanandaj, later rang her doorbell and offered cake and flowers. At one point, in need of a bone marrow transplant to treat his leukemia, her husband"s doctor refused to treat him, believing that he was Persian. Following her husband"s death, in 1986, Saeedpour opened the Kurdish Heritage Foundation of America with a library in her Prospect Heights, Brooklyn brownstone.
The museum, opened in 1988, was the first museum with a focus on the Kurds in the United States.
The library currently contains more than 2,000 texts in Kurdish and other languages, as well as Kurdish artifacts, art, costumes and maps. Foreign 15 years Saeedpour published a comprehensive and insightful quarterly on the middle east called Kurdish Life and edited the International Journal of Kurdish Studies as part of the Kurdish Program she established together with anthropologists at Harvard University and Cultural Survival.
Before the Gulf War, Saeedpour also organized a speaking tour for Kurdish politician Jalal Talabani, later to become President of Iraq. A resident of Fort Plain, New York, Saeedpour died at age 80 of a heart attack on May 30, 2010, in Schenectady, New New York
Member Brooklyn Borough President's Task Force on Cultural Understanding, since 1990. Member Phi Beta Kappa.
Married Marcel Beaudin, November 26, 1948 (divorced 1975). Children: Marc, Paul, Rebecca Beaudin Winston, Adam, Jeb. Married Homayoun Saeedpour, 1975 (deceased 1981).