Deborah Marrow


Deborah Marrow was an American arts administrator, longtime director of the Getty Foundation at the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Early life

Marrow was born in New York City and raised in Scarsdale, New York, the daughter of Seymour A. Marrow and Adele Marrow. Her father was an executive in the apparel industry. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970, with a bachelor's degree in history. She earned a master's degree in art history at Johns Hopkins University, and completed doctoral studies in art history at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978, with a dissertation about royal arts patron Marie de’ Medici.

Career

During graduate school, Marrow was a research assistant at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Marrow moved to Los Angeles in 1977. She became editor of Chrysalis, a feminist arts periodical that ceased production in 1980. In 1983 she began working on publications at the Getty Trust.
Marrow became director of the Getty Foundation, the grant-making program the J. Paul Getty Trust, in 1984. She was responsible for over $410 million in grants, to over a hundred arts institutions and scholars. "It gave me the opportunity to think about art and architecture across the entire world," she commented on her work with the Getty.
Marrow created the Getty Multicultural Undergraduate Internship in 1993, as a response to riots and racial inequalities in Los Angeles. The internship funds undergraduates who would otherwise not be able to sustain a typically unpaid internship in a museum or other arts non-profit. Marrow was especially known for funding, a citywide multi-institution event focusing on Los Angeles themes. She also took an interest in funding digitization projects at major museums, through the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative, and set up a $2 million fund for historical preservation in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Marrow served as interim president of the J. Paul Getty Trust twice, in 2006-2007 and in 2010-2011; at the time of her death, she was the only woman to ever serve as president of the Trust. She retired from the Trust in 2018, and the Getty Multicultural Undergraduate Internship was renamed the Getty Marrow Multicultural Undergraduate Internship Program in her honor that year.
Marrow also served on the board of trustees the University of Pennsylvania for sixteen years, from 2003 to 2019.

Personal life

Deborah Marrow married engineer Michael J. McGuire in 1971. They had two children, Anna and David. She died in 2019, aged 70, in Santa Monica, California.