David H. Mortimer

David H. Mortimer

"Mr. Mortimer is chief operating officer and a trustee of The American Assembly, a national, non-partisan, and public affairs forum founded by Dwight D. Eisenhower and affiliated with Columbia University. Before joining The American Assembly, he worked at Kuhn-Loeb & Co., an investment bank.

"At The Assembly, Mr. Mortimer has overseen nearly seventy national projects on domestic and international topics. He has been involved in every aspect of the planning, implementation, and follow-up and has run over eighty regional Assembly programs with institutions throughout the country and Canada.

"He is responsible for The Assembly's relations with Columbia University, its affiliate and fiscal agent, and renegotiated its unique financial and management "relationship". Similarly, he is responsible for maintaining The Assembly's association with Arden House--"home of The American Assembly"--and serves on the management board of the Arden Conference Center.

"Mr. Mortimer manages the day-to-day operations of The Assembly and has been responsible for the organization's financial stability and institutional health. He has overseen The Assembly's capital campaign and established the major part of its endowment fund. Recently, he has been responsible for many of the Assembly's most successful domestic projects, a number of which have spawned subsequent national programs. These include The City and the Nation (1994), Revitalizing America's Distressed Communities (1995), and Community Capitalism (1997), which influenced the Clinton administration's New Market Initiative. A reexamination of this project is underway.

"Mr. Mortimer was also responsible for several key projects, such as Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector in a Changing America, the Getty Center's first major conference in Los Angeles and the largest Assembly to date, which prompted a cover story by The Economist magazine. The project introduced The Assembly to many national foundations, which have funded subsequent Assembly projects. Another program, The Arts and the Public Purpose Assembly, according to the leading national arts service organizations, placed The Assembly at the center of the nation's cultural policy. It led to a multi-year initiative on Art, Technology, and Intellectual Property (2002).

"The Assembly's unusual publishing arrangement with W. W. Norton & Company for The American Assembly series was negotiated by and is overseen by Mr. Mortimer.

"Mr. Mortimer has been actively involved in a variety of private initiatives. He was part of a private delegation that met with the presidents of Hungary, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia to discuss relations between the US and these countries. He was also invited as part of a delegation by the Chinese government to tour the country and meet with governmental officials. He is president of the Mary W. Harriman Foundation, where he takes a pro-active role in directing foundation support. Mr. Mortimer also manages several of his family's concerns, and he is president of the board of St. John's Church in Arden, New York.

"Mr. Mortimer is the former vice chairman of Scenic Hudson, Inc., the largest conservation organization in the Hudson River Valley concerned with clean air and water, and is a director of the Scenic Hudson Land Trust, one of the county's largest land trusts dedicated to preserving open space.

"For more than twenty years as a director of the New York City Ballet Company, he has held a variety of board positions. Mr. Mortimer is on the Regional Council of the Storm King Arts Center, the largest outdoor sculpture garden in the world, and serves on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Visiting Committee of the Department of European Paintings. Mr. Mortimer has been associated with the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he helped establish the Library Fellows. He also serves on the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor executive committee, soon to be built in Orange County, New York. He is one of three Columbia University officers and faculty to serve as a director at the New York Council for the Humanities. In addition, Mr. Mortimer is affiliated with various membership organizations, including The Council on Foreign Relations.

"Mr. Mortimer holds a BA from the University of Denver. He is married to Shelley Wanger, an editor at Pantheon and Alfred A. Knopf. They have one daughter."


 * Director Emeriti, New York City Ballet