➜ WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
KATIE MURRAY
Director, Orange County Arts Commission
A thriving arts community, Katie says, can transform communities and local economies. According to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, state arts and cultural production in 2020 added more than $16 billion in value to North Carolina’s economy. In Orange County, the NEA grant Katie secured will support a monthlong public arts festival in summer 2023, which will be held in downtown Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Hillsborough. “It’ll be a really big, countywide public arts festival,” Katie says. “There are so many case studies out there about cities that are struggling, and they create some sort of space for arts, and they blossom.” In 2016, Katie and her husband, Steve Murray, moved to the area from eastern North Carolina (and later were joined by dog Bubba). Three weeks after unpacking, they stumbled upon the Handmade Parade, the biennial celebration of arts and creativity in Hillsborough, the first of many artistic opportunities in the area. “Almost any given night of the week, I could go to an art exhibit, a concert, a reading, and refill the tank. “Especially in And all of those things are a reminder of why I do what the pandemic, I have never I do and why I love it so much,” she says. “Especially been so when I do it with kids.” thankful to be Open for camps and classes from fiber arts to mosaic, a government the mill also hosts first Friday events for the community worker in the to gather and experience a new exhibit and enjoy a glass arts sector. But it was of wine and music. “It’s really about being accessible hard to work and allowing something for anybody to be able to for an industry participate in,” she says. “In nonprofit, you learn to be a that was jack- or jane-of-all-trades. I think it really instills a work completely ethic in you that you’re doing it for the mission.” shut down. This isn’t a job Katie’s mission-driven perspective is anchored where you’re in serving people of all ages and backgrounds; the just suppose organization offers financial assistance for the art classes to be behind a so self-expression is available to all. computer for “This is why I love what I do,” Katie says. eight hours a day.” “It transforms lives. It really does.” – by Elizabeth Poindexter
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believe in the power of the arts,” says Katie Murray, the director of the Orange County Arts Commission, which recently secured a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts under her leadership. “The arts are fundamental to us as humans,” she says. “They’re able to address issues going on in our world in a way that people can rally behind.” Katie, who has a degree in communications from Elon University, has been at the helm of the arts agency for nearly six years. During her tenure, she has helped expand the role of the arts commission and open the Eno Arts Mill in Hillsborough, among other things. And then came the pandemic. Katie went into action. “I spearheaded the relief fund that raised $150,000 for artists and also the request to the county for the $100,000 Restart the Arts grants for organizations,” she says. The self-described “weird art kid” turned her passion into a career as an events and marketing manager for arts nonprofits. She spent more than 20 years working in the Blue Ridge Mountains to North Carolina’s coast. She says relaying the economic effects of the arts to the public is among her biggest challenges. “When businesses like Apple are looking at the Triangle to decide whether or not to come here, they look at things like your cultural offerings,” Katie says. “That comes with a thriving arts community.”
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chapelhillmagazine.com
May/June 2022