The following biographical sketch was compiled at the time of induction into the Academy in 2008.

Vaughan Inge Morrissette has spent a lifetime expanding the dimensions of volunteerism and civic leadership. She is a goodwill ambassador for her city and state.

Born in 1933 in Mobile, she graduated from Murphy High School and Sweet Briar College. She then married the late H. Taylor Morrissette and immediately went to work building both her family and her community.

Four decades and scores of boards and committees later, she is still one of Alabama’s busiest and most effective supporters of worthy causes from the arts to economic development. Education has been one of her most active fields of service. She has served on the boards of her alma mater, Sweet Briar College in Amherst, Virginia; Washington and Lee University, also in Virginia; and Spring Hill College in Mobile. She served on the advisory board to the business school of the University of South Alabama and the foundation board for the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind. She also served on the governing board and chaired the foundation of the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science; she led the fund drive to build the school’s state-of-the-art library.

In nontraditional education, she has played a transformational role at American Village, a unique civic and educational center in Shelby County. As deputy director, she has brought national attention to the cultural and educational resource, in part by drawing on her national contacts within the Colonial Dames and the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. As vice regent and then regent of Mount Vernon, she helped plan and lead a $100 million capital campaign to preserve President Washington’s home and dramatically upgrade its educational facilities and programs.

In Mobile, her involvement has been felt in almost every significant community campaign over the past four decades. She chaired the Mobile Infirmary Medical Center board; was chairman of the capital drive to build the new $15 million Mobile Museum of Art; served for years with the Mobile Junior League; and is on the board of governors of the new Carnival Museum, which preserves the history and lore of the nation’s first Mardi Gras celebration; to name a few. She has served as a director of AmSouth Bank.

At the state level, she is a trustee of the Department of Archives and History; the State Council on the Arts; the Women’s Hall of Fame.

She is a graduate of Leadership Alabama and has served on the vestry of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. She has four children and eleven grandchildren.

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