Michael Murphy
Michael Murphy is an architect, leader, educator and writer, whose work focuses on how the built environment shapes our lives, our health, and our communities. Murphy is the Founder and a Board Member of MASS Design Group an architecture firm that expands access to design that is purposeful, healing and hopeful, where he was CEO until 2022. He was the lead designer on a number of acclaimed projects notably including The National Memorial For Peace and Justice with Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, the Embrace/MLK Jr. Memorial in Boston and the Butaro District Hospital with Dr. Paul Farmer and Partners in Health in Rwanda. Murphy curated the acclaimed “Design and Healing” exhibit for the Cooper Hewitt museum in the wake of the pandemic.
Michael and MASS have been honored with numerous awards including notably as a TED Prize finalist, the AIA Architecture Firm of the Year Award, the Architecture Innovator of the Year by the Wall Street Journal, The Royal Institute British Architects International Fellow Designation, The American Academy of Arts & Letters Award in Architecture and The Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Architecture and many more.
Murphy and his work have been featured on 60 Minutes, a TED Talk viewed more than 1.8 million times and in the Bill Clinton podcast, Why Am I Telling You This? His work has also been profiled in the New York Times, The Atlantic as a part of their “Tomorrow’s Greatest Inventors,” Wired, Fast Company, the Boston Globe and many others. His own writing has been published in the Harvard Design Magazine, Volume, the Boston Globe, Huffington Post, Stanford Social Innovation Review, The Journal of Architecture, Design Observer, and Humanitas.
He has held academic appointments as the Thomas Ventulett Chair of Architecture at Georgia Tech University and at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Ohio State University, MIT’s School of Architecture, Cornell University, the University of Michigan, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture & Planning, Harvard University’s School of Public Health and many more. He holds an M. Arch. from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. from the University of Chicago.
Murphy’s work has been featured in distinguished exhibitions in the US and abroad and he has Keynoted and lectured at numerous institutions including notably The Mellon Foundation, The MOMA’s Ambasz Institute, the International House of Japan, PopTech, and the Aspen Ideas Festival.
He is from Poughkeepsie New York and currently lives in Boston with his wife and two children. His first trade book will publish with One Signal, Simon & Schuster in 2026.
