Subdivision
| • | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | [X] |
| | 201 | Name: | Ms. Alice Waters | | | Institution: | Chez Panisse Restaurant and Café | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1944 | | | | | | |
Alice Waters was educated at the University of California, Berkeley. Among her wards are: Best Chef in America, James Beard Foundation, 1992; Best Restaurant in America, Gourmet magazine, 2001; Force for Nature Award, Natural Resources Defense Council, 2004; Lifetime Achievement Award, Restaurant magazine’s World’s 50 Best Restaurants, 2007; co-recipient, with Kofi Annan, Global Environmental Citizen Award, 2008; and National Humanities Medal, 2014. She authored (with C. Petrini, W. McCuaig) Slow Food: The Case for Taste (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History) in 2004, The Art of Simple Food: Notes and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution in 2007, and The Edible Schoolyard, 2008; In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heart in 2010. She was elected a member of American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2007.
Alice Waters has been one of the world’s premier advocates for healthy, homegrown, and exceptional food. If there are now scores of books and articles written about food and health, Waters has been one of the world’s leaders in the movement toward Americans and others eating more healthy food – and having them do it as part of a family experience. Indeed, she has been “credited with revolutionizing American cooking in the 1970s and 1980s,” according to The New York Times. She is the executive chef, founder (in 1971), and owner of the, now legendary, Chez Panisse Restaurant and Café in Berkeley. She is one of the leaders of the slow food movement. She started projects at Yale University on sustainable foods; she extended the program to the American Academy in Rome. She works in the California school system to enhance awareness among our youth of the value of eating better food. For her work on multiple fronts, she has won a host of awards, including the Global Environmental Citizen Award in 2008 (which she shared with then U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan). There have been few people in the past several decades who match Alice Water’s positive influence on the eating habits of Americans. | |
| 202 | Name: | Mr. Thomas J. Watson | | | Institution: | IBM & American Foreign Service | | | Year Elected: | 1984 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1914 | | | Death Date: | 12/31/93 | | | | |
| 203 | Name: | Dr. Bernard Charles Watson | | | Institution: | Temple University & The Barnes Foundation | | | Year Elected: | 1991 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1928 | | | | | | |
As the former president and CEO of the William Penn Foundation, Bernard Watson was a forceful, able executive who set the foundation on its present path. The first African-American to hold the position, he is credited with helping to bring about solutions to many Philadelphia-area problems while working well with the board and strengthening the organization's staff. A former public school teacher and deputy superintendent of the Philadelphia School District, Dr. Watson has a strong background in education, having also served as a Presidential Scholar, professor of urban studies and academic vice president at Temple University. An endowed chair at Temple was established in his name in 2008. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1967). Dr. Watson has also been Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Barnes Foundation as well as vice chairman of the Pennyslvania Convention Center. He has received awards ranging from the Educator's Roundtable Marcus Foster Award to the National Urban Coalition's Education and Community Service Achievement Award, and in 1974 he published the book In Spite of the System: The Individual and Educational Reform. | |
| 204 | Name: | Mr. John F. Welch | | | Institution: | General Electric | | | Year Elected: | 2000 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1935 | | | Death Date: | March 1, 2020 | | | | |
| 205 | Name: | Dr. Herman B Wells | | | Institution: | Indiana University | | | Year Elected: | 1964 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1902 | | | Death Date: | March 18, 2000 | | | | |
| 206 | Name: | Dr. Cornel West | | | Institution: | Union Theological Seminary | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1953 | | | | | | |
Cornel West is Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor at Union Theological Seminary, having previously held the position Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University until 2021. In 1984, he went to Yale Divinity School in what eventually became a joint appointment in American Studies. In 1988, he moved to Princeton University where he became a Professor of Religion and Director of the Program in African-American Studies. In 1994 he accepted an appointment as Professor of African-American Studies at Harvard University, with a joint appointment at the Harvard Divinity School. West taught one of the University's most popular courses, an introductory class to African-American Studies. In 1998, he was appointed the first Alphonse Fletcher University Professor. West utilized this new position to teach not only in African-American studies, but in Divinity, Religion, and Philosophy. West left Harvard after a widely-publicized dispute with then-President Lawrence Summers in 2002. That year, West returned to Princeton, where he continued to teach in African-American Studies. He remained at Princeton until July 2012, when he became Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and moved to the Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York where he had started as an Assistant Professor after receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton University. Cornel West remained at Union Theological Seminary until his return to Harvard in 2016.
Dr. West's teaching and research interests include philosophy of religion and cultural criticism, and his many intellectual contributions draw from such diverse traditions as Marxism, pragmatism, transcendentalism and the African American Baptist Church. Perhaps more than anyone else, he has restored the full presence of the spoken voice to the discourse of contemporary philosophy: the rhythmic structure of the performed word, the philosophically performed word. He is the author of books such as Prophesy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity; The American Evasion of Philosophy; The Ethical Dimension of Marxist Thought; Prophetic Thought in Post Modern Times; Race Matters; and Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism as well as the spoken-word recording "Sketches of My Culture." A brilliant thinker and speaker, Dr. West maintains a truly international focus and perspective on the enormously complex issues of race, ethnic identity and class. | |
| 207 | Name: | The Honorable John C. Whitehead | | | Institution: | Federal Reserve Bank of New York & International Rescue Committee & Andrew W. Mellon Foundation | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1922 | | | Death Date: | February 7, 2015 | | | | | | |
John Whitehead was born in Evanston, Illinois and grew up in Montclair, NJ.
He graduated from Haverford College in 1943, served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and received his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1947.
After receiving his degree, he began at Goldman, Sachs & Company and retired in 1985 as co-chairman and senior partner.
From 1985-89, he served as Deputy Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan.
When he returned to New York, he became active in a number of educational, civic and charitable organizations, serving, at various times, as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the United Nations Association, the International Rescue Committee, the Greater NY Councils of the Boy Scouts, the Brookings Institute and the National Gallery of Art.
He had served as a director of the Nature Conservatory, Lincoln Center Theater, the East-West Institute, Rockefeller University, the J. Paul Getty Trust and the National Humanities Center, among others.
In 2001 he was appointed as Chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the organization responsible for the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan. He served in that capacity until May 2006. He was also the Founding Chairman of the National September 11th Memorial and Museum. In 2012 he was awarded the Asia Society Award.
John Whitehead was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1997. He died February 7, 2015, at age 92 at home in New York. | |
| 208 | Name: | Dr. Deborah Willis | | | Institution: | New York University | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | | | |
Deborah Willis, Ph.D. is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and has affiliated appointments with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social & Cultural and the Institute of Fine Arts where she teaches courses on Photography & Imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women, and gender. She is also the director of NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture/Institute for African American Affairs. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, contemporary women photographers and beauty.
She received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and was a Richard D. Cohen Fellow in African and African American Art, Hutchins Center, Harvard University; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and an Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. Fellow. In 2019 she was the Robert Mapplethorpe Photographer in Residence of the American Academy in Rome, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received awards from the College Art Association for Writing Art History (2021) and the Outstanding Service Award from the Royal Photographic Society in the UK. She was awarded the Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art by the Crystal Bridges Museum in 2022 and named the Mary Lucille Dauray Artist-in-Residence by the Norton Museum of Art in 2023. She has pursued a dual professional career as an art photographer and as one of the nation's leading historians of African American photography and curator of African diasporic cultures.
Willis is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship, Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present; Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty; Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers - 1840 to the Present; Let Your Motto be Resistance – African American Portraits; Family History Memory: Photographs by Deborah Willis; VANDERZEE: The Portraits of James VanDerZee; and co-author of The Black Female Body A Photographic History with Carla Williams; Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery with Barbara Krauthamer; and Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs (both titles a NAACP Image Award Winner).
She lectures widely and has co-edited books Women and Migration(s); authored many papers and articles on a range of subjects including The Image of the Black in Western Art, Gordon Parks Life Works, Steidl, Volume II; America’s Lens in Double Exposure: Through the African American Lens; “Photographing Between the Lines: Beauty, Politics and the Poetic Vision of Carrie Mae Weems,” in Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography & Video, and “Malick Sidibé: The Front of the Back View” in Self: Portraiture and Social Identity. Professor Willis is editor of Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography; and Black Venus 2010: They Called Her "Hottentot", which received the Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Edited Volume in Women's Studies by the Popular Culture/American Culture Association in 2011.
Exhibitions of her artwork include: Monument Lab Staying Power, Philadelphia; 100Years/100Women, Park Avenue Armory, In Conversation: Visual Meditations on Black Masculinity, African American Museum Philadelphia; MFON: Black Women Photographers, African American Museum Philadelphia; In Pursuit of Beauty, Express Newark, Rutgers University, Newark, “Mirror Mirror” Express Newark, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ; A Sense of Place, Frick, University of Pittsburgh; Regarding Beauty, University of Wisconsin, Interventions in Printmaking: Three Generations of African-American Women, Allentown Museum of Art; A Family Affair, University of South Florida; I am Going to Eatonville, Zora Neale Hurston Museum; Afrique: See you, see me; Progeny: Deborah Willis +Hank Willis Thomas. Gantt Center.
Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: “Framing Moments in the KIA” Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts, “Framing Beauty” at the Henry Art Gallery; "Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments" at Indiana University; “Migrations & Meanings in Art” Maryland Institute of the Arts; “Convergence”, Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans; “Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty,” Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, “Visualizing Emancipation,” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, “Gordon Parks: 100 Moments,” Schomburg Center; “Posing Beauty Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits” at the International Center of Photography, “Social in Practice: The Art of Collaboration”, Nathan Cummings Foundation, "Home: Reimagining Interiority '' at YoungArts, and “Free as they want to be: Artists Committed to Memory '' at the National Underground Freedom Center, FotoFocus Biennial 2022.
In addition to making art, writing and teaching, she has served as a consultant to museums, archives, and educational centers. She has appeared and consulted on media projects including the documentary films such as Through A Lens Darkly, Question Bridge: Black Males, a transmedia project, which received the ICP Infinity Award 2015, and American Photography, PBS Documentary. Since 2006 she has co-organized thematic conferences exploring “Black Portraitures” focusing on imaging the black body. She holds honorary degrees from Pratt Institute and the Maryland Institute, College of Art. She is currently researching two projects on photography and the black arts movement and artists reimaging history. | |
| 209 | Name: | Governor Thomas W. Wolf | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | |
| 210 | Name: | Sir James D. Wolfensohn | | | Institution: | The World Bank | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1933 | | | Death Date: | November 25, 2020 | | | | | | |
Sir James D. Wolfensohn was Chairman of Wolfensohn & Company, LLC, a private investment firm and an advisor to corporations and governments. He became Chairman of Citi International Advisory Board on April 18, 2006. He was also advisor to Citi's senior management on global strategy and on international matters. He was the ninth president of the World Bank Group (1995-2005). On May 31, 2005, at the end of his second term, he left office and assumed the post of Special Envoy for Gaza Disengagement for the Quartet on the Middle East, a position he served until April 30, 2006. In this role, he helped coordinate Israel's planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and spearheaded reconstruction efforts as Palestinians assumed sovereignty over the area. He was also Chairman of the advisory group of the Wolfensohn Center, a new research initiative focused on global poverty, at the Brookings Institution. He was the third president in the World Bank's history to be reappointed for a second five-year term by the Board of Executive Directors. As President of the World Bank, he travelled to more than 120 countries in order to pursue the challenges facing the World Bank in regard to poverty and environmental issues. He led successful initiatives on debt reduction, environmental sustainability, anti corruption programs, and AIDS prevention and treatment. He developed activities on religion and culture and decentralized offices overseas linked by the most modern telecommunications system in the international community. Prior to joining the Bank, Mr. Wolfensohn was an international investment banker. His last position was as President and Chief Executive Officer of James D. Wolfensohn, Inc., his own investment and corporate advisory firm set up in 1981 to work with major U.S. and international corporations. He relinquished his interests in the firm upon joining the World Bank. Before setting up his own company, Mr. Wolfensohn held a series of senior positions in finance. He was Executive Partner of Salomon Brothers in New York and head of its investment banking department. He was Executive Deputy Chairman and Managing Director of Schroders Ltd. in London, President of J. Henry Schroders Banking Corporation in New York, and Managing Director of Darling & Co. of Australia. Throughout his career Mr. Wolfensohn has also closely involved himself in a wide range of cultural and voluntary activities, especially in the performing arts. He has served as Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University for the last 18 years. In 1970, Mr. Wolfensohn became involved in New York's Carnegie Hall, first as a board member and later, from 1980 to 1991, as Chairman of the Board, during which time he led its successful effort to restore the landmark New York building. He was Chairman Emeritus of Carnegie Hall. In 1990 Mr. Wolfensohn became Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. On January 1, 1996, he was elected Chairman Emeritus. Mr. Wolfensohn has been President of the International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis Societies, Director of the Business Council for Sustainable Development, and served both as Chairman of the Finance Committee and as Director of the Rockefeller Foundation and of the Population Council, and as a member of the Board of Rockefeller University. He was an Honorary Trustee of the Brookings Institution, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Century Association in New York. Born in Australia in December 1933, Mr. Wolfensohn is a naturalized U.S. citizen. In 2014 he reestablished his Australian cititzenship and now has dual U.S./Australian citizenship. He holds B.A. and LL.B. degrees from the University of Sydney and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Graduate School of Business. Before attending Harvard, he was a lawyer in the Australian law firm of Allen, Allen & Hemsley. Mr. Wolfensohn served as an Officer in the Royal Australian Air Force and was a member of the 1956 Australian Olympic Fencing Team. Mr. Wolfensohn is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society. He has been the recipient of many awards for his volunteer work, including the first David Rockefeller Prize of the Museum of Modern Art in New York for his work for culture and the arts. In May 1995 he was awarded an Honorary Knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II for his contribution to the arts. Sir James Wolfensohn has also been decorated by the governments of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Georgia, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Pakistan and Russia. He and his wife, Elaine, an education specialist and a graduate of Wellesley, B.A., and Columbia University, M.A. and M.Ed., have three children: Sara, Naomi, and Adam. His autobiography, A Global Life: My Journey among Rich and Poor, from Sydney to Wall Street to the World Bank, was published in 2010. James Wolfensohn died on November 25, 2020, in Manhattan at age 86. | |
| 211 | Name: | Mr. Edgar S. Woolard | | | Institution: | DuPont | | | Year Elected: | 1996 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1934 | | | Death Date: | December 4, 2023 | | | | | | |
Edgar S. Woolard, Jr. was born in North Carolina in 1934. He graduated from North Carolina State University in 1956 with an industrial engineering degree and took a job at DuPont's Kinston, North Carolina plant the next year. He quickly demonstrated an aptitude for management, and during the 1960s he held supervisory positions at Kinston, Wilmington and Old Hickory. As managing director of the Textile Marketing Division during the economic downturn of the mid-1970s, Woolard took a hard look at DuPont's corporate performance. His conclusion was that the company could no longer depend on big scientific breakthroughs and huge manufacturing facilities. Instead he focused on lowering costs and streamlining the production process. In the late 1970s, as general manager of Textile Fibers, Woolard worked closely with customers and suppliers in pursuit of more efficient textile manufacturing. After he was elected executive vice president and appointed to the Board of Directors in 1983, Woolard streamlined management and production in three other departments: Agricultural Chemicals, Photo Products and the Medical Division. Woolard was elected president and chief operating officer in 1987 and chief executive officer two years later, a period when DuPont faced economic recession, the loss of important markets to competitors, and a possible takeover. To streamline corporate decision making, Woolard eliminated the Executive Committee and directed department managers to report directly to the CEO. These measures cut corporate costs $3 billion between 1991 and 1994. Woolard also initiated DuPont's joint venture with Merck Pharmaceutical and major investments in new agricultural chemicals. Woolard retired from DuPont in December 1995. | |
| 212 | Name: | Dr. Harry Woolf | | | Institution: | Institute for Advanced Study | | | Year Elected: | 1977 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1923 | | | Death Date: | January 6, 2003 | | | | |
| 213 | Name: | Dr. Mark S. Wrighton | | | Institution: | Washington University in St. Louis | | | Year Elected: | 2001 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
Before being named chancellor of Washington University in 1995, Mark Wrighton served for five years as provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was an assistant professor at M.I.T. at the age of 23 and, fifteen years later, became chairman of the Department of Chemistry. Dr. Wrighton's gifts as a teacher, administrator and scientist are widely recognized. For his achievements has received the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Grant, and the American Chemist Society Award in Pure Chemistry, among other honors. From 1983-88 he was a MacArthur Fellow, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; the American Chemical Society; and the Electrochemical Society. In 2018 he was named a leader of United Way community campaigns. Mark Wrighton was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2001. | |
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