Rudy Owens in Tampere, Finland, February, 2024
Rudy Owens is a Detroit native who grew up in the Midwest and attended public schools in University City, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis. He spent much of his adult life living in the West Coast states of Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. He has a professional background in communications, international relations, and public health. He earned a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in journalism and a master of public health degree from the University of Washington School of Public Health.
As a writer and photographer, Owens has travelled around the world and throughout the United States. His photographs have appeared in the New York Times and in numerous publications and as one-man photo shows in Portland, Seattle, and Anchorage. He continues to work on photojournalism projects, most recently on his two recent tips to Finland, in September 2023 and February 2024. His latest writings focus on his recent connections made with his wider Finnish kin network in 2023 in Finland, a place that consistently ranks as one of the most caring and innovative nations for years in global rankings generated by the United Nations.
For several years, Owens worked as a reporter in California and Oregon, and later as a writer and editor in Santiago, Chile. Owens’ professional work for Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade at its consulates and Anchorage and Seattle took him widely throughout the Pacific Northwest and to nearly every corner of Alaska. Owens also worked in community-based public health in Washington State and for two years during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing public health communications for the state of Oregon. He currently lives in Portland and continues to do communications work for the state.
Owens has been sharing his photography and his writings on history, public health, and policy for nearly two decades. His past and more recent writing and photography can be found on: Whatbeautifullight.com, Rudyowensblog.com, Rudyfoto.com, and his personal web page, Rudyowens.com. Essays on his book website Howluckyuare.com examine the public-health harm caused by laws that deny adoptees equal rights to their birth records and medical history, and Owens’ decades-long struggle for equality with the state of Michigan.
As an adoptee who successfully found his birth families in 1989 and obtained his original birth records against nearly impossible odds, Owens has advocated for decades that all adoptees and birth parents are entitled to equal treatment under the law. His search for his records and biological kin revealed how adoptees in seeking their true records still face opposition from friends, family, state agencies, Christian organizations, and many institutions. His experiences with the state of Michigan and its vital records staff, the Wayne County Probate Court, and his former adoption agency demonstrated how adoptees are denied basic legal rights granted to all other citizens.
(Last updated, March 2024)