2001 – New York, New York
Catherine Gamble Curran was born in Beijing where her father, Sidney D. Gamble, was connected with the YMCA and Princeton-Yenching. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Mount Holyoke, after graduate work in India Area Studies at the University of Pennsylvania she accompanied her husband, Jean A. Curran, Jr., to India on a fellowship to survey Indian political parties. From 1951 to 1956, they were at the American Embassy in New Delhi. In 1958, she moved to London where she served as a vice chairman of the committee that both funded and arranged for the Bicentennial exhibition, “Sacred Circles” shown in the U.S. and Britain, and chaired the committee that funded and arranged for the 1979 tour of the New York City Ballet in London-the first time the company had danced in England since 1961. For seventeen years, she was President/Secretary/Treasurer of the Mount Holyoke Club of England. In 1984, Mrs. Curran moved back to New York and in 1985 discovered a cache of photographs taken by her father in China between 1917 and 1933. The collection consists of four thousand black and white negatives, six hundred hand colored glass slides and numerous articles, letters and publications. As President of the Sidney D. Gamble Foundation for China Studies, she oversees the collection. She has co-curated and supervised tours of two exhibitions of the photographs, one in the United States and one in China. Cathie Curran is a trustee of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Young Concert Artists, the American Federation of Arts, Princeton-in-Asia and the Little Traverse Conservancy, Harbor Springs, Michigan. She is a past trustee of Mount Holyoke College, the New York City Ballet, and the National Dance Institute and serves on the advisory councils of numerous arts, music and dance organizations. She has two children, Constance Curran McPhee, Ph.D., who manages the Print Study Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Peter G. Curran, M.D., who practices medicine in Sun Valley, Idaho. (Deceased, 2007)
