Bio
Don Kurz is an entrepreneur, former championship athlete, and dance instructor. He has been a senior partner in a major international consulting firm, successfully taken a company public on Nasdaq, started a hedge fund, and currently is the executive board chair and principal shareholder of leading creative agency Omelet LLC.
Don served for twelve years on the Johns Hopkins University board of trustees and subsequently was elected a trustee emeritus for life. He was awarded the Johns Hopkins Heritage Award for exceptional life long service to the institution, and he has endowed the Kurz Family Scholarship to provide tuition support for low-income students.
He was a key player on the first Johns Hopkins University NCAA lacrosse championship team in 1974, though two serious knee injuries prematurely ended his lacrosse career in 1976. Don is currently an active mentor of student-athletes at Hopkins. He was voted the Outstanding Athlete at Elmont Memorial High School his senior year and has recently been inducted to the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame.
Don was a dance instructor for Arthur Murray Dance Studios and was a regular at New York iconic disco Studio 54 in the late 1970s.
Don has served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Business and has been a guest speaker on a variety of topics at Johns Hopkins, the Anderson School of Management at UCLA and the Young President’s Organization. He has previously been a board member of gang violence prevention organization A Better LA, a donor and guest teacher with Teach for America and donor and advisor to Project Angel Food in Los Angeles. He is an emeritus Advisory Board member (having recently completed two terms on the board) of Johns Hopkins affiliate, Jhpiego, which provides critical health care services to women and families in over 30 countries around the globe.
He earned his BA from Johns Hopkins University and an MBA from Columbia University.
