Mary McDonagh Murphy is an award-winning director, writer, television producer, independent filmmaker and best-selling author.

 

Murphy wrote, produced and directed Protactile: A Language of Touch for PBS American Masters which appeared in July 2023. She wrote and produced Becoming Helen Keller, broadcast on American Masters in October 2021, and wrote and directed Laura Ingalls Wilder: Prairie to Page, which aired in December of 2020.

Her documentaries about the novelist Harper Lee also appeared on the series. Harper Lee: From Mockingbird to Watchman which aired in July, 2015, coincided with the release of Lee’s early manuscript Go Set a Watchman. The documentary includes a rare glimpse of Ms. Lee herself and is an update of Murphy’s independent film, Hey Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird, which was released theatrically in 20 cities and broadcast on American Masters in 2012.

Murphy’s other television credits include The Making of the Wiz Live (NBC, 2015), The Making of Peter Pan Live (NBC, 2014), Live From Space (National Geographic, March 2014) and The Making of the Sound of Music Live, (NBC, 2013).

She has written and produced a variety of primetime hour-long programs and magazine stories for NBC and CBS News, where she won six Emmy Awards.

Murphy is the author of Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird, a New York Times best seller, published by Harper Collins. She also has written for Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Post, Publishers Weekly and the Daily Beast. A native of Rhode Island, she is a graduate of Wesleyan University and was a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford University. She lives in Piermont, N.Y.