Vanessa Hirschowitz
Vanessa Hirschowitz (born 1968 in Birmingham) is an architect and jewelry designer.
Hirschowitz is the daughter of gastroenterologist Basil Hirschowitz and his wife, Barbara. She graduated from Indian Springs School in 1986 and then studied architecture and art history at Barnard College in New York, New York. She went on to complete a master's in architecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
Hirschowitz interned with Birmingham architect William Barrett in 1993. After graduating, she worked for Perkins Eastman; Buttrick, White & Burtis; and then for Italian architect Aldo Rossi, serving as project manager for the Scholastic Building in New York. She opened her own firm, with studios in Chicago, Illinois and London, England, in 1999.
Hirschowitz also studied jewelry design and metalworking with Giovanni Corvaja, Tamiko Ferguson, Lisa Spiros and Cecilia Bauer. She closed her firm in early 2000 to focus on jewelry making.
In 2015 Hirschowitz was charged in two separate incidents with assaulting police officers. On August 23 she allegedly struck an officer after being asked to leave a store on North Ashland Avenue in Lexington, Kentucky. On September 8 she allegedly attacked a Mountain Brook Police Department officer with a bayonet while he was investigating a suspected elder abuse case involving Vanessa's mother. A family attorney said that she had "wrongfully left" the psychiatric ward at UAB Hospital shortly before the incident occurred. As of January 2017, she was no longer required to be in a mental health facility after completing treatment in Texas. She was indicted in the Mountain Brook attack in July 2017.
Hirschowitz is married to physician Nick Kouchoukos.
References
- Gray, Jeremy (September 9, 2015) "Mountain Brook woman charged with attacking police officer with bayonet." The Birmingham News
- Robinson, Carol (July 7, 2017) 'Woman indicted in 2015 bayonet attack on Mountain Brook police officer." The Birmingham News
External links
- V-Line Design website