LIZZIE OWEN - Chief Executive
The Millennium Tapestry Company 

Lizzie was responsible for the original concept of the tapestry projects and was appointed by the trustees Chief Executive of the not-for-profit company at its inception in 1998.

She trained at the Wolfson School of Nursing, working in the Westminster Hospital and in other hospitals in the group. Lizzie graduated as a State Registered Nurse in 1978, continuing work as a Staff Nurse.

Lizzie also has extensive experience in the media industry, in advertising sales and marketing, working on the London Evening News, IPC Magazines, British Airports Authority (W. H. Smith Advertising), and The Mail on Sunday, where she headed up the Femail and Men’s Fashion sections.

She subsequently worked with her husband, Robyn Owen, on his overseas missions as a marketing consultant for the European Commission, setting up and attending meetings with government departments and the private sector in Namibia, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.

Lizzie took up art and design during a short period when she was confined to a wheelchair, and subsequently pursued her studies at the North Oxfordshire College of Art, where she took a particular interest in watercolour, mixed media and textural embroidery. She has had several individual and joint exhibitions of her paintings in North Oxfordshire, and examples of her work are in private collections as far afield as the United States, Hong Kong and Australia. She held art classes at a primary school in Banbury, and one of her under 9 year olds’ textural embroideries won first prize nationally in the Sheldon Textile Competition for under 12 year olds.

Lizzie has worked for several local charitable projects in North Oxfordshire, notably as a team leader for a senior citizens’ lunch club, which also involved her in the Motor Neurone Disease Association.

ROBYN OWEN - Planning Director
The Millennium Tapestry Company

Robyn joined The Millennium Tapestry Company in 1998, and has devised the logical frameworks for the tapestries, written the schools' briefs and and designed the many exhibitions.

After graduating with an honours degree in Classics at the University of Reading, Robyn learned marketing as a Unilever Graduate Trainee in London, and has worked for major Unilever operating companies, as well as in the international advertising agencies BBDO and McCann-Erickson, handling many multinational marketing accounts, major banks and financial institutions in the U.K.

He has extensive experience as board director both in the U.K. and in South Africa, where he worked as senior account director and board director for J Walter Thompson in Johannesburg. Robyn was appointed to head a campaign promoting racial equality in South Africa and was also a guest lecturer in marketing (MBA course) at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Robyn was a senior partner in Partnership Consultants, a London-based international marketing, tourism and communications consultancy, from 1986 to 2000, handling assignments for the European Commission, the World Bank Group, the World Tourism Organization and the Commonwealth Secretariat. From 1991 to 1996 he worked on EU Trade and Services Development Programmes for African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. Robyn had specific responsibilities for several individual countries, including Ghana, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, Namibia, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Grenada and Guyana. Subsequently, he undertook a detailed tourism review in Lesotho for ComSec, also designing a European market research programme, and has written main tourism brochures for Malaëi. He was a team member on an UNCTAD disaster management study for the tourism sectors of developing countries, and project director on an EU structural strengthening programme for the Macau Institute of Tourism Education.

Robyn Owen is accredited to the European Commission as a Grade I Consultant.