Life and career
Lillich was born in Chicago, Illinois, on February 9, 1932, the daughter of Allan D. Parsons. She obtained a BA from Oberlin College in 1953, and after studying art history as a 1953-1954 Fulbright Fellow at the Free University of Brussels, an MA from Cornell University in 1957. She later obtained a PhD from Columbia University in 1969; her doctoral dissertation was titled The Stained Glass of Saint-Père de Chartres.
In 1968, Lillich became an instructor at Syracuse University. She was promoted to assistant professor in 1969, associate professor in 1973, and full professor in 1981. She was director of the 1980 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Seminar for College Teachers. She was also a 1976 NEH Fellow in Paris, a 1980-1981 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, a 1981 and 1987-1988 Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts Visiting Senior Fellow, a 1983 Fulbright Senior Research Fellow in Paris, and a 1988 Institute for Advanced Study Fellow. She was awarded Syracuse University's 1987 William Wasserstrom Prize for Outstanding Graduate Teaching.
She specialized in medieval stained glass. Books she authored include The Stained Glass of Saint-Père de Chartres (1978) - which won a Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant - Rainbow Like an Emerald: Stained Glass in Lorraine in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (1991), The Armor of Light: Stained Glass in Western France, 1250-1325 (1994) and Stained Glass Before 1700 in Upstate New York (2004). In 2007, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the stained glass of Reims Cathedral; this allowed her to write her next book The Gothic Stained Glass of Reims Cathedral (2007).
In 1953, she married legal scholar Richard B. Lillich.
Lillich died at her home in Syracuse, New York, on March 18, 2026, at the age of 94.
