About Marcia

Award-winning, critically acclaimed (and sometimes controversial) writer Marcia Mitchell is the author of five non-fiction books, with publishers including Simon & Schuster, Holt Rinehart, and Harper Collins UK. Her independent work is published by  “Doggone Good Books” Maxmillion House. Marcia’s articles have appeared in national women’s magazines and on Huffington Post and Truthout. She has been interviewed on national and international television and radio, and appeared before a Capitol Hill panel to testify about the Katharine Gun case. (See The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War.)   

    While a primary focus has been on writing, Marcia’s interests and background also include extensive work in the areas of public broadcasting and film. She was a senior executive at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and a long-time member of the Washington’s WETA TV/FM Board of Directors. She retired as Associate Director of the American Film Institute, where her responsibilities included the annual European Film Festival, the Directing Workshop for Women, the Independent Filmmaker Project, film preservation activities, the film theater at Washington’s Kennedy Center, and various film education programs. She also produced numerous high-profile events for AFI, including premieres of major motion pictures. In her post-AFI life, Marcia was co-producer of a Broadway-style musical at the London Palladium. Ava Astaire McKenzie’s tribute to her dancer father was an SRO success. In another venue, she has lectured on classic film on the QE2, the Crystal Symphony, and other venues.

    Before going to Washington and Los Angeles, Marcia was the first female member of the South Dakota Governor’s Cabinet, at the time the only woman in the country in the role of Secretary of Labor. She serves, and has served, on numerous boards and commissions dealing with the arts and humanities, both statewide and nationally. In 2013,she received the South Dakota Governor’s Awards in the Arts distinction for outstanding support of the arts by an individual. A native of San Jose, California, and a great-granddaughter of a California historian, she is listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who of American Women. Marcia is a graduate of Norwich University in Vermont.

    Widowed, Marcia has two “remarkable and brilliant” grown children and divides her time between her homes in the Black Hills of South Dakota and in the California Desert, at Rancho Mirage. With dual American/Irish citizenship, she also enjoys time spent in the village of Ballydehob on the southwest coast of Ireland.