Iona Dedicates Art Center To Beloved Trustee

NEW ROCHELLE, NY — Iona has dedicated one of its more prominent buildings on North Avenue in honor of a long-serving trustee with a passion for the arts.

Iona College officials dedicated the JoAnn Mazzella Murphy ’98H Arts Center on Saturday.

Murphy was remembered as well-liked and a zealous member of the Iona community for more than 20 years. During her time on the Board of Trustees, she built a reputation as a steadfast supporter of the arts. Murphy was president of the Edmund Rice Christian Brothers Art Foundation and was also an honorary Christian Brother.

"JoAnn was dedicated to supporting the arts at Iona as a way of creating new opportunities for students to grow and succeed,” her husband Joseph Murphy said at Saturday's dedication ceremony. “To see her name on a building that is bustling with art in so many forms brings me tremendous joy, knowing that her legacy lives on in a way that was so near and dear to her heart.”

In 1998, Murphy received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, for her dedication and support of the arts and cultural events at Iona. She was chair of the Iona College Council on the Arts, which in 1987 received an endowment from the Baron Lambert Fund for the Arts, established by JoAnn and Joseph Murphy.

Her leadership is credited for helping Iona’s arts programing to grow in both breadth prestige.

Thanks in part to a gift from JoAnn and Joseph Murphy, Iona will soon unveil a new green space in the heart of campus. The planned Murphy Green will transform a parking circle into an outdoor community gathering space.

Iona plans to complete the project in spring 2022.

"Through her work and her gifts, JoAnn upheld and celebrated the Christian Brothers’ dedication to the transformative power of education in so many ways," Iona President Seamus Carey said. "She touched countless lives and left the world a better place. The renaming of the art center is a fitting memorial to a woman who devoted herself to Iona, its students and the arts."

Murphy wore a few hats during a successful career, both at and away from Iona. She was vice chair of Country Bank, broker-owner of Ellinghouse & Stacy and a former art and antiques gallery owner.

She served as trustee of her high school, St. Pius V in the Bronx and was also a trustee of the Ursuline School in New Rochelle.

Murphy was a co-founder of the Westchester Chapter of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and served as co-chair of Columbia University’s Diabetes Advisory Committee (now the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center). At the Berrie Center, she established the Christopher J. Murphy Memorial Professorship of Diabetes Research and supported diabetes research through the Columbia Center for Translational Immunology.

The JoAnn Mazzella Murphy ’98H Arts Center is located just outside of the Iona College campus at 715 North Ave. in New Rochelle.