Ashley Ferro-Murray, Ph.D.

Ashley Ferro-Murray is the program director for the arts at the Doris Duke Foundation, where she drives and oversees grantmaking and other efforts to advance the foundation’s support for performing artists.  

Prior to joining the Doris Duke Foundation, Ferro-Murray was the senior curator of theater and dance at The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she commissioned and produced new works by artists including Laurie Anderson, Maria Hassabi, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Andrew Schneider and Sage Ni’Ja Whitson. She was a founding board member for Bienal de las Artes de Cuerpo, Imagen y Movimiento de Madrid and has served on the Simons Foundation Triangle Program Advisory Committee and as an advisor for the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. She is also a frequent public speaker whose research has been published most recently in The Drama Review and in collections published by Bloomsbury Press and Duke University Press (forthcoming). 

Ferro-Murray currently serves on the New York State DanceForce, International Presenting Commons and TURBA (An International Journal of Live Arts Curation) advisory board. 

She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in performance studies with a designated emphasis on new media.