Johanna van Lohuizen-de Leeuw

In 1978, along with Raymond Allchin, Bridget Allchin, Harold Bailey, and her husband, Jan van Lohuizen, she founded the Ancient and Indian Iran Trust in Cambridge, to promote study in South Asian and Iranian archaeology and art. In order to house the institute, they bought a house in which they shared their private collections and established a substantial library of books, materials, and items relating to South, and Central Asian art and archaeology. The Van Lohuizen library at the Institute now houses papers, archives, and research of Johanna van Lohuize-de Leeuw as well as Jan Van Lohuizen, and is an important archive of artifacts and scholarship, especially in Dutch, in the field.

She was the editor of a number of notable academic publications, including Studies in South Asian Culture from 1969 to 1993 and Handbuch der Orientalistik, Kunst und Archäologie from 1970 to 1992. At the European Association of South Asian Archaeaeology and Art, she established biennial conferences for the field to promote academic dialogue and was elected the president for these conferences.

Between 1956 and 1983, she built an extensive personal collection of black and white photographs of ancient Asian artifacts, documented from her visits to archaeological sites as well as recording artifacts in public and private collections that she had accessed. She was instrumental in encouraging her colleagues to also make such photographic records of their work, and collaborated with professional photographers like Josephine Powell to photograph and document Asian art and artifacts. Her entire collection, comprising over 30,000 images, was housed during her lifetime at the Institute of South Asian Archaeology in Amsterdam, but is now situated at the University of Leiden, at the Kern Institute.

Johanna van Lohuizen-de Leeuw began her career teaching at Cambridge University in 1951, where she lectured on Indian art and archaeology. In 1958, she was appointed professor of archaeology at the University of Amsterdam, where she taught the early history of South and South-east Asia. She founded the Institute of South Asian Archaeology at the University of Amsterdam.

She married fellow historian Jan van Lohuizen in 1943. They did not have any children. She died of a hemorrhage in 1983, in Amsterdam.

Johanna Engelberta van Lohuizen-de Leeuw (25 October 1919 - 8 December 1983) was a Dutch archaeologist and art historian, specializing in South and South-east Asia. Fluent in Sanskrit, she contributed important research to the study of antiquities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka, as well as in Thailand and Indonesia. Along with Raymond and Bridget Allchin, Jan van Lohuizen, and Harold Bailey, she founded the Ancient and Indian Iran Trust in Cambridge in 1978 to support historical and archaeological research in those regions, which later became a center of academic research in the field. She made notable contributions to the history of Kusana art. She was active in conservation efforts to preserve the archaeological sites of Indus Valley settlements at Mohenjo Daro, working with UNESCO for this purpose. She was also a photographer, and personally built an extensive collection of photographs of rare Asian artifacts, which is now housed in the University of Leiden.

Johanna van Lohuizen-de Leeuw was born on 25 October 1919 in Amsterdam, to Willem Carel de Leeuw and Margareta Lievina Muller, and spent part of her childhood in the United States. Her early education was in Baarn and Leiden. She went on to study archaeology and Sanskrit at the University of Leiden and later at the University of Utrecht, working with scholars such as Franciscus Bernardus Jacobus Kuiper, J.Ph. Vogel, Nicholaas Johannes Krom, and Frederik David Kan Bosch. Her dissertation, supervised by Jan Gonda, studied art in the 'Scythian period' in North India, from the 1st century B.C. to the 3rd century A.D. During her studies, she also worked in several museums in Leiden, cataloguing Indian photos at the Kern Institute, researching Hindu Javanese antiquities in the Leiden Museum of Ethnology, and teaching Sanskrit at Groningen University.