Kitty Boone, the executive director of the Aspen Ideas Festival and vice president of public programs at the Aspen Institute, is stepping down from her role at the Institute later this month to pursue new opportunities. She announced her departure internally in late July, and her last day is Aug. 31.
Boone has helped lead the Ideas Festival since its inception in the early 2000s, when she worked with colleague Elliot Gerson to build a world-renowned convention of leaders and big thinkers. (The concept originated from the Institute’s then-CEO, historian and writer Walter Isaacson.)
The inaugural festival in 2005 featured about 100 speakers, including author Toni Morrison, primatologist Jane Goodall and former secretary of state Colin Powell. This year, the speaker list was more than triple the size, drawing thousands of attendees to Aspen to hear from politicians, artists, scientists and an extensive list of other movers and shakers.
And though big names are always a draw for festival goers, Boone showed equal enthusiasm for lesser-known speakers who might inspire new ways of thinking; she has long been an emphatic booster for the value of curiosity and different perspectives.
“Curiosity is critical,” Boone said in an interview earlier this year. “I think if we aren't, as social animals, interested to learn things that we don't know anything about, or interested to dive more deeply into a topic that we tend to see one side of, … we fail ourselves as a society.”
In a provided statement, the Institute’s current president and CEO Dan Porterfield credited Boone and her team for the festival’s success, writing that they “made the Aspen Ideas Festival a reality and shaped it into the globally significant event it is today.”
Throughout her two-decade tenure at the Institute, Boone also played a pivotal role in the development of other public-facing programs around the world.
She joined the organization in the early 2000s to lead a series called “Great Collisions” — a precursor to future public conversations about critical global issues, and a departure from the closed-door sessions of some policy programs at the Institute. Over the course of her career, she helped develop a host of other conferences as well, like Aspen Ideas: Climate in Miami and the Bloomberg CityLab summit, which has been held in cities like Washington, D.C. and Amsterdam.
From the get-go, Boone was determined to bring different and sometimes opposing perspectives together, with a focus on solutions to global challenges rather than ideological flashpoints.
“Examining doom and gloom and despair is not really productive,” Boone said in an interview last fall, referencing her approach to the Aspen Ideas: Climate program.
“I actually have always thought that human ingenuity solves so many problems,” Boone added. “And if we can just unleash possibility and inspire people to consider solutions, we will get past that.”
Tributes from her colleagues that were shared with Aspen Public Radio describe Boone as an energetic, ambitious and highly intellectual leader, as well as a compassionate mentor and advocate for her colleagues.
Editor's Note: Boone was a member of Aspen Public Radio's board of directors from 2017 to 2021.