Penelope McPhee
Penelope McPhee is the President Emeritus of The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, where she served as president from 2004 until her retirement in February 2021.
Prior to moving to Atlanta, Penelope served as vice president and chief program officer of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami, FL, from 1996 to 2004, leading grant-making programs of the nearly $2 billion foundation. A national leader in the arts, she joined Knight Foundation in 1990 and launched its national Arts and Culture Program.
Penelope has had a distinguished career as an author and television producer. Her television documentaries and performance programs have won five Emmys, as well as prestigious awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Association of Television Program Executives. For seven years she was on the staff of WPBT, Miami’s public broadcasting station, where she launched its cultural affairs department and served as executive producer of cultural programming. During that period, Penny served on the board of Miami-Dade County’s Art in Public Places Program.
She is also a noted author whose pictorial history of the civil rights movement, “Martin Luther King Jr. A Documentary: Montgomery to Memphis,” was recognized in 1980 as one of the “Best Books of the Decade” by the American Library Association. Her 1986 book, “King Remembered,” received the New York State Martin Luther King Jr. Medal of Freedom.