Obituary: Investment manager Stephanie Prem, 61, helped families, nonprofits

At Abbot Downing, a Wells Fargo division, attorney Stephanie Prem helped wealthy families plan where their money would go, both during their lives and after their lifetimes.

As her parents advised her many year earlier, she picked a practical career, eventually choosing law over medicine. She kept quiet the longing she'd had since girlhood — to become an artist.

She couldn't be an artist, so Prem supported artists and also musicians, serving on boards of the Minnesota Opera, Weisman Art Museum, Illusion Theater, James Sewell Ballet and other arts organizations up to the end of her five-year battle with cancer, her family said.

Prem, of Minneapolis, died at home on Sept. 18. She was 61.

She loved artists, said her daughter, Caroline Owens.

"She had a passion for these people who were able to pursue what they lived with every inch of their being, and I think she really respected that in people," Owens said.

"She would do anything for anyone; she was very selfless. She didn't ever expect anything back. … She just wanted for other people to have success."

"She was a dynamo," Murray said.

She not only helped the Minnesota Opera balance its budget, but helped the financial stability of a number of nonprofit organizations that she was involved with, including the American Cancer Society, said Murray and Peter Heegaard, a retired Wells Fargo executive who was once Prem's boss.

Her busy career began as an estate-planning lawyer. Attorney Sidney Kaplan said he had interviewed a number of Stepford-wife looking candidates, all in drab, dark pantsuits with white blouses, when Prem walked in, radiating confidence with her red blazer and gorgeous smile.

He hired Prem at Robins, Davis & Lyons and began a 40-year-professional relationship as her mentor. She left there for another law firm, then joined Norwest Capital Advisors, an investment management firm for wealthy families.

Heegaard, who hired Prem as financial principal at Norwest, called her a "terrific employee" who served clients and pioneered all of the firm's branding and image-building, which helped bring in more clients.

She led Norwest's rebranding to "Lowry Hill" in the early 1990s as chief marketing officer for the firm, now Abbot Downing.

Born in Minneapolis, Prem was one of three children of Dr. Konald and Phyllis Prem, a well-known physician and nurse from Edina.

"Her passion for the arts started a lot younger than many people know and realize," Caroline Owens said.

"I want to go into medicine, and right now want to be either a psychologist or a pediatrician," Prem wrote for a project the summer before 10th grade at St. Margaret's Academy. "My ambition is to become an artist, but I doubt if that dream will ever become reality."

In 1974, she graduated cum laude in psychology from the University of San Francisco, then switched to law.

In addition to her husband, daughter and parents, survivors include son Charley Owens and siblings Mary Kristen Francis and Tim Prem.

Services have been held.