Vera Blinken (born Vera Evans) was the wife of Donald M. Blinken, an American businessman and diplomat.
Vera was Donald’s second wife and they were married at the time of his demise.
Vera Blinken was born in Budapest and came to the United States in 1950.
She graduated from Vassar College with a degree in art history and practiced interior design, first at the architectural firm of Edward Durell Stone, and later as the founder of Vera Evans Interiors.
In 1996, while living in Hungary as the wife of the ambassador, she founded PRIMAVERA, the first mobile breast cancer screening program in Central and Eastern Europe.
Vera and Donald have a several decades-long relationships with the Open Society Archives (an archival repository and laboratory that aims to explore new ways of assessing, contextualizing, presenting, and making use of archival documents both in a professional and a consciously activist way).
They provided crucial support for setting up the 1956 Digital Archive.
In 2015, at the height of the international refugee crisis, Vera and Donald Blinken helped create the 1956 Hungarian Refugees in the United States special digital collection.
Vera and Donald Blinken’s personal archive consisting of over 600 items is deposited at the Archives and includes text documents and photographs, as well as their jointly authored book, Vera and the Ambassador: Escape and Return, which was published in 2009.
In 2002, Vera Blinken was awarded the Middle Cross of the Republic of Hungary for her services to the Hungarian people.
Vera’s husband died on Sept. 2022 at age 96.