Orange Blossom Award: The Leader Who Let Herself Feel — and Then Got to Work
by Avery Anderson
Every day in December, The Arts Passport is recognizing someone whose quiet, persistent work holds this region’s arts scene together — the kind of people who rarely get applause but absolutely deserve it.
We call them the Orange Blossom Awards: small spotlights for the folks who keep the cultural ecosystem running when no one’s watching.
Today’s honor goes to someone who never expected to become the face of an arts agency in crisis — and handled that role with more heart, honesty, and forward momentum than anyone could have predicted.
Creative Pinellas CEO Margaret Murray.
There’s a moment from last fall that arts folks still remember. A packed county meeting, a procedural curveball, and somewhere in the middle of it, Margaret stepping out of the room in tears.
It wasn’t a breakdown. It wasn’t a slip.
It was the rare kind of honesty that collapses any distance between “administrator” and “artist.”
For a moment, she was simply one of the hundreds of creatives in that room — someone who loves this community enough to feel the hit.
But here’s what the Orange Blossom Award is really for:
She didn’t stop there.
Avery Anderson
Margaret wasn’t hired to navigate political fallout, funding upheavals, or the existential question of what Creative Pinellas becomes after losing its home base. She could have said, “This isn’t what I signed up for,” and anyone would’ve understood.
Instead, she walked back in.
She steadied her team.
She reopened doors that felt shut.
She began reshaping the organization with a kind of hopeful practicality — part strategist, part convener, part relentless optimist who refuses to believe the arts are anything less than essential.
And she’s doing it with a new lightness, too.
A sense of possibility.
A belief that the future doesn’t have to mirror the turbulence of the past.
Under her leadership, Creative Pinellas is now forging partnerships, experimenting with new funding structures, and imagining what a modern county arts agency might look like when you build it intentionally — not just inherit it.
In other words: she turned vulnerability into velocity.
Plenty of leaders know how to stand tall when things get messy.
Great leaders know when to be human — and then how to rebuild.
That’s why today’s Orange Blossom Award goes to Margaret Murray:
For showing up.
For staying when leaving would’ve been easier.
And for steering Pinellas arts toward a future defined not by loss, but by reinvention.
What Are the Orange Blossom Awards?
A month-long series from The Arts Passport celebrating the people and organizations whose quiet, steady work strengthens Tampa Bay’s arts ecosystem. No applications. No campaigning. Just community-driven recognition, released daily in December.
Other Orange Blossom Stories:
December 1
Avery Anderson
December 2
Avery Anderson
December 3
Avery Anderson
December 4
Avery Anderson