Priscilla Capps

Priscilla Capps was born in Chicago in 1900, the daughter of Edward Capps, a Princeton classicist who served as United States Minister to Greece in 1920 and 1921, and Grace Alexander Capps. She studied biology at Smith College and joined her father in Athens, where she also studied at the American School of Classical Studies. The destruction of Smyrna (Izmir) in September 1922 and the 1923 Greek–Turkish population exchange drove more than a million Greek Orthodox refugees out of Anatolia into Greece, an upheaval rooted in the Greek and Armenian Genocides. Capps joined Near East Relief in Athens in 1923.

In 1925 she became Overseas Director of Near East Industries, a Near East Relief enterprise that employed refugee women to produce silk embroidery and weaving for sale in Athens and through Near East Relief shops in the United States. She worked alongside women who had survived the genocides and expulsions, recovering and reproducing traditional Greek-island and Anatolian patterns. The workshops grew into a network of several hundred women across Athens, Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Crete, and Thessaloniki. Capps ran the Athens operation until 1940 and was evacuated from Greece in 1941. She married Harry Hill in Athens in 1933 and died in 1985.