Conn Nugent was born in Dublin, Ireland of Irish-American parents: James P. Nugent, a civil engineer, and Polly O'Donnell, a fashion model. Nugent's paternal grandfather, James J. Nugent, worked as a labor-union organizer and Tammany politician. His maternal grandfather was a coal industry lobbyist in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Nugent and his four siblings were raised in Larchmont, New York. He graduated with honors from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. In between, Nugent served two years with the Peace Corps in Costa Rica. His appointment in 1977 as executive director of the VingoTrust - a family foundation endowed by Boston investor WIlliam Appleton Coolidge - marked the first step in what was to become a back-and-forth pattern of running both foundations and the non-profits that rely on them.
Non-Profit Consulting & Management
Nugent has served as executive director of a variety of non-profits: they include New Alchemy Institute ; International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War ; Five Colleges, Inc. ; Liberty Tree Alliance; ; and the . On the philanthropy side, Nugent was the Founding Environmental Program Director at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and served as Executive Director of the . His Cummings portfolio concentrated on carbon-intensiveness in US transportation and agriculture. At JM Kaplan he developed a program that concentrated on North American cross-border ecosystems. The cross-border emphasis also informed Kaplan's Historic Preservation Program. Nugent has been a Member of the Board of Directors of The Land Institute for 24 years. He served as Chairman for eight years. He was also a Board Member of the Association of Massachusetts Grantmakers, the and the , and a Senior Fellow at the . In 2015, Nugent was asked by The Pew Charitable Trusts to a) assess the possible environmental consequences of mining the ocean seabed; and b) consider the advisability of a new Pew program on the subject. His reports informed the decision of the Pew Board to establish that program and set as its objective the first-in-history approval of an environmental protection rulebook to govern an industry before it begins. Nugent then agreed to become the first director of the Pew Seabed Project and remained at its head for four years.
Writing & Editing
Most of Nugent's writing output has taken the form of private reports on philanthropic initiatives, usually on environment and historic preservation. Beginning with his tenure as Narthex of the Harvard Lampoon, he has also kept up a side career writing for newspapers and magazines. Nugent was a frequent contributor to Stewart Brand's CoEvolution Quarterly, and designed and guest-edited that journal's “When Things Go Wrong” issue. His articles have appeared in the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the New England Monthly. Nugent devised and managed two award-winning websites of the 1990s: Liberty Tree Alliance and . In 2003 Nugent and DJ LaChapelle produced one of the first wildfire crazes of the Internet: , a site that showcased the hapless spokesman as a hero of French deconstructionists and Hollywood press agents. Nugent's writings include:
Environment
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Nugent has four children with his wife, actor and writer Katherine Kormendi. Two are in college and two attend public middle school in Washington DC. Nugent has two older children from his first marriage: Benjamin Nugent, a novelist and short-story writer, and Annie Baker, a playwright. Nugent's brother Rory Nugent is a writer and reporter.
