Pauline Ann Turley is the vice chair of the Irish Arts Center, New York. She holds a B.A. in Drama and Theatre Studies from Trinity College Dublin. Pauline recalls how she moved to New York right out of college at age 23, knowing no-one, and started as an intern at the Irish Arts Center. “Being Irish, and on my own, people could not have been nicer to me, and I made life-long friendships through the Irish Arts Center.”

Now, the Irish Arts Center is her first love, where she and her colleague Aidan Connolly have raised more than $47 million to build a new Irish Arts Center to better tell the evolving story of the Irish in America through the arts.

Pauline is the fifth of seven children, and was born in Newry, Co. Down, to parents who are also Down natives. Pauline got her first job gathering potatoes with her parents when she was six years old. Her first paying job, however, was weighing mushrooms at a mushroom factory (at age seven), which was followed by a lucrative babysitting career at 10.

As of June 24th this year, she will be married to Charles Garland. She also hopes for more transparency, governance, and affirmative equality policies for women in the workplace.