As a teenager growing up in Roswell, Georgia, Maggie Carruth O’Connor was a violin prodigy.
By the 10th grade she was concertmaster of the Georgia High School All-State Orchestra, a prestigious position that marked her for a likely career in music performance. But underneath the accolades, her talent had out-run her desire.
The adolescent Maggie preferred to be on the soccer pitch, where she was eventually recruited to play in Presbyterian College in South Carolina. The practice and perfection required to be a classical violinist seemed like a straitjacket.
“Growing up, I had this curious, rebellious side,” O’Connor said in an interview at the Common House. “I didn’t really know where I fit. I was classically trained as a violinist starting at age four. My parents wanted to push me into being a classical violinist, and I hated it. … I just don’t love being in the limelight.”
Today, O’Connor, who moved to Chattanooga in 2019, is one of the city’s busiest millennials, with a career involving several moving parts that are hard to categorize. She calls herself a “creative producer.”
O’Connor was adopted from Korea when she was six months old, and came to live with her adoptive family in suburban Atlanta. Her adoptive parents had two other children, who became her older brothers.
After college, she spent about a decade in Atlanta working in marketing and human resources. She worked for a while at a start-up advertising agency called Dagger, a company that took great pains to retain top employees. O’Connor was at the tip of the spear in Dagger’s push for employee engagement.
When O’Connor and her husband, Chris, decided to move to Chattanooga, they felt the city was pulsing with untapped energy. Chris is a sales leader for a tech company here.
“Chattanooga welcomed us with open arms, and still does,” Maggie O’Connor said. “We are in an interesting place of being able to create and build and mold, but without stepping on people’s toes.”
“… We were looking for a lifestyle change. We were coming up to this area often for hiking trips and back-packing trips and things of that nature.”
Since coming to Chattanooga, O’Connor has started a non-profit called Third Place Productions that serves as an umbrella for her two passion projects, TEDxChattanooga (the Ted Talks derivative here) and the Highland Park Porchfest. (She also works for the Tivoli Theatre Foundation.)
The TEDxChattanooga franchise was scattered and nearly dormant when she obtained the local license for the knowledge-sharing forum a few years ago, and which is now becoming one of the city’s signature intellectual events.
The TEDxChatatnoga 2025 conference will be November 19 at Walker Theater inside Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium. It will include many different TED talks and a couple of breakout groups. The theme will be “Rooted” with sessions involving technology, education and design.
Meanwhile, Porchfest, a music series currently based in the Highland Park neighborhood, is poised to expand to other parts of the city. It started during COVID when O’Connor repurposed some of her musical talent to put on a porch concert with her bluegrass trio Crooked Wits.
“It took me 10 years to remove the heavy perfectionism that was ingrained in me (as a classical violinst,” she said. “Now, my relationship with music is entirely different that what it was when I was a young-adult.”
This year the Porchfest in Highland Park will expand to include different musical genres, including hip hop, R&B, Americana, folk, blue grass, grunge, indie rock, folk, and more. One day, O’Connor envisions Porchfest events in other parts of the city such as Red Bank and the Belvoir neighborhood of Brainerd.
The O’Connors and their two-year-old daughter, Naomi, live in Highland Park, where they’re happy to stay.
“The amount of collaboration and community centeredness here is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” she said. “We have no intent of going anywhere, anytime soon. … I feel confident in saying we are rooted in Chattanooga as a family.”
Maggie Carruth O’Connor
* Age: 38
* Hometown: Atlanta
* Occupation: Creative producer
* Family: Husband Chris O’Connor, daughter Naomi (age 2)
* Hobbies: Violin, mountain biking, snow boarding