Boston, MA –  For nearly 20 years, Dawn Carroll has been a stone design and fabrication consultant to New England’s most prestigious builders, interior designers, and architects. She has been recognized for her exceptional design collaborations and noteworthy involvement in the region’s commercial and residential design industries. Now, after more than a decade as a stone designer at the prestigious Cumar Marble and Granite, Carroll has launched her independent design consultancy.

Simultaneously, she also announces her first international client, Irish Natural Stone (INStone), and will serve as the U.S. Representative for both their indoor and outdoor products. She is also launching a collaboration with award-winning Boston kitchen designer Rosemary Porto.

The INStone appointment brings Carroll’s career full circle: more than 20 years ago, Francis McCormack of INStone lit the flame of Carroll’s longtime fascination with rocks.  At the time, Carroll was a tour manager in the music business, and McCormack brought her to a special place for rock lovers called “Boston” in the heart of Burren National Park in County Clare, Ireland – a unique landscape carved by geological forces throughout the millennia.  When Carroll discovered that one of the quarries was located in Kilkenny, Ireland, where her family name had originated, she finally found her answer to the question, “How did you get started in the stone industry?”.

As one of the leading specialists in the use of stone and its conservation in Architectural Heritage, INStone is recognized as a world expert in restoring historic stone structures, such as cathedrals and abbeys, and their studio is also home to some of Ireland’s finest stone fine art sculptors.  Carroll will begin filming a documentary of the work of INStone in May with long-time collaborator and video producer Cary Benjamin.

Carroll is also launching a collaboration with award-winning kitchen and bath designer Rosemary Porto, who left her long-term position as Senior Designer for Poggenpohl in Boston last year. The two have been close friends and collaborators for decades, and are combining their forces to offer high-end kitchen design consultation by referral.

Carroll recognizes Porto as one of the key mentors of her stone design career and both have dedicated their careers to mentoring the next generation of designers.

Likewise, through his experience and as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, InStone’s, McCormack has identified the need to mentor and educate future generations in the restoration of architectural treasures and the artistry of using natural stone as a medium.  McCormack is launching a training academy for natural stone masonry where Carroll will also be a guest trainer.

Carroll’s passion for mentorship led to her co-founding a special non-profit foundation with Grammy Award-winning jazz vocalist, Patti Austin. This dynamic pair created the Over My Shoulder Foundation, a unique media-based project raising awareness about the lifelong benefits of mentorship. Dawn believes that mentoring stimulates the creative mind and that creative minds will find the answers to many problems we face today. Mentoring fosters leadership skills, creating stronger and more compassionate leaders.

“Without support and emotional sustenance, without a positive influence in our lives, we can become lost, disconnected, and unstable as individuals and as a society,” comments Carroll. “Proper mentoring is the miracle that fosters creativity, reconnects the disconnected, changes lives, and moves us all toward a society of greater inclusion, integrity, and value.” 

Before returning to her New England roots, Carroll’s earlier career in Hollywood revolved around design, but also around film production and a different kind of rock: Rock and Roll.

A talented songwriter, Carroll will soon release a new CD of songs, created in collaboration with Boston Rock veteran Jon Butcher, and inspired by the life and work of Mary Cardwell Dawson (1894-1962).  Dawson founded the historic National Negro Opera Company in Pittsburgh in 1941. The CD, to be launched at an event February 7, 2024 at the Minotti showroom in Boston, is also destined to be the music for a stage musical, “If The Walls Could Talk”.  Patti Austin will return to Boston to mentor a young theatre group in a workshop production of the musical this coming summer.  Austin will play the lead role of Mary Cardwell Dawson, who was herself a mentor to hundreds.

For Dawn Carroll, her new independent design consultancy is yet another chapter in a diversified, accomplished career that is both extraordinary and noteworthy. 

• Dawn Carroll is available for interviews.

• The “Songs for Mary” CD is available for review.  Learn more at https://songsformary.com