Donn B. Murphy

Donn B. Murphy taught acting, theatre design, theatre history, playwriting and speech courses at Georgetown University for 40 years. He directed plays and activities of the Georgetown Mask & Bauble Dramatic Society for half of that time. He served as Vice-President and then President of the National Theatre Corporation from 1974 to 2013.

Bor in Leavenworth, Kansas, he graduated from Immaculata High School and Saint Benedict’s College, and received a Master’s degree from the Catholic University of America. He earned a PhD from the Department of Theatre at the University of Wisconsin. For 20 years, he conducted a theatre workshop with patients of Chestnut Lodge, a psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Maryland.

He was Lighting Director for two summers at the Starlight Theatre in Kansas City, Missouri. For five seasons, he and Kathleen Barry, wrote, produced and appeared in interactive theatre pieces at the Meadow Tent at Wolf Trap Farm Park. The entire audience was up on their feet throughout the presentations, actively involved in the productions.

He served in the US Army in Japan, and subsequently, working with Margaret E. Lynn, the head of US Army Entertainment, he held summer workshops for US Army Entertainment directors at Georgetown, and at Army bases abroad.

He was technical liaison for theatrical productions at the White House during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

In 1970 he was a faculty member at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies and in 1971, he served as Production Coordinator and Director of the Film Festival for the U.S. Pavilion at the Man and His World exhibition in Montreal. He was a Festival Manager for the opening of EPCOT Center at Disney World in Florida, and in 1986, served as the District of Columbia Representative to Thailand and China for the Royal Pacific Cultural Exchange.

He retired from Georgetown in 1990, and from the National Theatre in 2013.