2015 HUGH F. MCKEAN PUBLIC LECTURE
Presented in association with Rollins College
Tiedtke Concert Hall, Rollins College, Winter Park

Parking is available in the SunTrust Parking Garage in Winter Park, which is accessed via Lyman or Comstock Avenues off of Park Avenue.

Anne-Marie O’Connor is a veteran foreign correspondent, war reporter, and culture writer who has covered everything from post-Soviet Cuba to American artists and intellectuals. Her story on Maria Bloch Altmann’s effort to recover the family Klimt collection appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine in 2001. In her 2012 book, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, O’Connor chronicles the riveting details of the successful recovery of this important painting looted by the Nazis.

The Morse initiated its Public Lecture in 2004 to bring speakers to the community whose specialty in art holds relatively broad public interest. The more popular subject matter of these lectures distinguish them from others presented at the Morse, which are also free to the public but more narrow in topic.

These special presentations of the Morse honor Hugh F. McKean’s career as an educator, his love for art, and his vision for enriching the community through the museum with a knowledge and appreciation of art. McKean was president of Rollins College from 1951 to 1969 and the Museum’s director until his death in 1995.

O’Connor, a staff writer with the Los Angeles Times for 12 years, currently writes for The Washington Post from Jerusalem. As a Reuters bureau chief in Central America, she covered the wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Working for a newspaper chain, she covered Cuba, the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, coups in Haiti, and U.S. interventions in Haiti and Panama. At the Los Angeles Times she chronicled the violence of Mexico’s Arellano-Felix drug cartel; and profiled such figures as Nelson Mandela, George Soros, Joan Didion, John McCain, and Maya Lin. She has written for Esquire, The Nation, and The Christian Science Monitor.

O’Connor attended Vassar College, studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, where she and fellow students co-created an award-winning documentary on the repression of mural artists after the 1973 military coup in Chile.