Hedi Bak was born in Pirmasens, Germany in 1924. Her studies towards an architectural career at the Meisterschule Fuer Kunstankwerk were interrupted in 1943 by the war. From 1947 to 1950, she studied at the Freie Ackademie in Mannheim where she married her fellow student, Bronislaw Bak, a Polish former prisoner of war. In 1952 she immigrated to the US with her husband two sons, settling in Chicago. Balancing a career and life as a homemaker, she eventually returned full time to her art. During the 1960’s she took on the management of Studio 22, a printmaker’s workshop she and her husband founded, and Gallery Mid-North, an artist cooperative, while continuing to produce hundreds of fine prints and paintings. At Studio 22 she taught classes in intaglio printmaking. With the closing of Studio 22 in 1970, the couple returned to Europe where she was hired by the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany. Undergoing curatorial training there, she was entrusted with the task of pulling a commemorative edition of illustrations from the original blocks of the first Gutenberg Bible at the Museum.
Returning to Georgia in 1972, she joined the art faculty at Savannah State College until 1976 when she opened a gallery in Statesboro, Georgia. In 1982, a year after her husband Bronislaw died, she suffered a massive stroke while undergoing surgery for an aneurysm. Confined to a wheelchair, she was told she would never walk again. She fought back, learned to walk again, drive and after a move to Atlanta, met and married Charles Counts in 1990, a well-known Southern ceramist who had been living and teaching in Nigeria. In 1991, together with Charles, she moved to Africa and lived in the northern desert city of Maidugari becoming immersed in the culture and community of her adopted home. Charles died after a brief illness in the summer of 2000, and Hedi returned to the US and settled in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where she lives today, still drawing and writing about her life.
