Marcella Luiso Flanagan

Marcella Luiso Flanagan is an American fashion designer and manufacturing executive who became a pioneering advocate for women in business. Beginning in the 1960s, she built a career in an industry with few women in leadership and later served as the founding executive director of the New York Association of Women Business Owners, established in 1977. She also organized New York City’s first Salute to Women in Business Week. In American Destiny, she preserves the story of her Italian American family and their life-changing return to postwar Italy in 1948.

Her niece and coauthor, Phyllis Clare Orlowski, is a retired educator, advocate, writer, and artist. Having lived and studied in Florence, she speaks Italian fluently and maintains deep ties to the family’s heritage in Apulia. Her research, artwork, and collaboration helped bring Marcella’s memories to the page.