Louis Appignani

Louis J. Appignani died in Miami on 14 October 2026 at the age of 93. His family announced the death to WLRN on 15 October. No cause was published in the station's obituary.

Visitation and services were held on Saturday 17 October 2026 at Van Orsdel Funeral Home, Coral Gables Chapel, followed by burial with U.S. Army military honors at Flagler Memorial Park in Miami. He was survived by his wife Laurie and family.

Louis J. Appignani was born on 30 March 1933 in Manhattan, New York City, to Italian immigrant parents, and was raised in the Bronx. He attended postgraduate studies in economics at Indiana University, graduated from Baruch College of the City University of New York, and earned a master's degree in finance from Columbia University.

He served as an officer in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1958, including service in Korea. After leaving the service he worked in accounting and consulting at Price Waterhouse, Lybrand, Ross Bros. and Montgomery, and Booz Allen and Hamilton, and became a New York CPA.

In 1965 Appignani founded a computer training school, Computer Education Inc., sixteen years before the IBM Personal Computer reached the market. In 1968 he acquired the Barbizon Modeling School. As president and chairman for more than thirty-two years, until 2000, he expanded Barbizon from a single school into a national and international franchise. Its television and print campaign, Be a Model or Just Look Like One, became a familiar American advertising line. Among Barbizon alumni was Amelia Vega, Miss Universe 2003 and a graduate of Barbizon Santo Domingo.

He later founded and chaired Louja Realty Inc. in Miami. Colleagues and family remembered him as a businessman who moved early into computing education and then into a consumer brand that reached far beyond New York.

With his wife Laurie, Appignani settled in South Florida and became a long-standing patron of WLRN Public Media. The station honored the couple during its 75th anniversary celebrations in 2023. He was a member of The Explorers Club and travelled to the Amazon, the Galapagos, the highlands of Papua New Guinea, Namibia, Borneo, Cambodia and China, often seeking cultures few outsiders encounter.

In 2001 he established the Appignani Foundation to support secular activities aimed at long-term human goals. He founded the Appignani Humanist Legal Center, a project of the American Humanist Association that litigates for religious liberty and civil rights from a humanist perspective, and helped create the IHEU Appignani Center for Bioethics. In 2006 the AHA gave him its Humanist Business Award.

His best-known gift came in 2016: $2.2 million to the University of Miami to endow the Appignani Foundation Chair for the Study of Atheism, Humanism, and Secular Ethics, the first chair of its kind at an American university. Speaking to The New York Times, he said he was trying to eliminate discrimination against atheists and to make atheism legitimate.

Appignani left two public footprints: a consumer brand that taught generations of Americans to see modeling as approachable, and a philanthropic record that pushed atheism and secular ethics into mainstream higher education and public media. The Miami chair and the humanist legal and bioethics centres continue under the names he gave them. WLRN remembered him as a donor who invested in ideas and institutions meant to move society forward.