75th Anniversary Celebration Dinner
This year, we reflect on our progress, celebrate our impact, and look forward to the future with optimism and excitement. To mark this milestone, we invite you to join us in celebrating the Aspen Institute’s 75th Anniversary Celebration on Saturday, June 28th—a momentous event to honor the vision of our founders, Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke. Their belief in the transformative power of ideas, leadership, and dialogue remains as relevant today as ever. Walter Paepcke once said, “The difficulty of our time is a difficulty of the human spirit.” This enduring insight continues to guide and inspire our work.
The 75th Anniversary Celebration embodies the Institute’s foundational principles—discovery, community, and a deep connection with nature.
This celebratory fundraising event will feature a beautiful culinary evening, and dialogue under the stars on our historic Aspen Meadows campus. The evening will transcend conventional gatherings by creating a realm of inspired exploration, engineered to ignite intellectual curiosity. We are excited to share speakers and special guests in the coming weeks. We hope you can join us as we reflect on 75 years of dialogue, leadership, and impact. For more information about table sponsorship or tickets, please email Liz.Busch@AspenInstitute.org.
About our Speaker(s):
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Walter Isaacson is the Leonard Lauder Professor of American History and Values at Tulane. He is the past CEO of the Aspen Institute, where he is now a Distinguished Fellow, and has been the chairman of CNN and the editor of TIME magazine.
Isaacson’s most recent biography is Elon Musk (2023). He is also the author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2021), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Steve Jobs (2011), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992), and coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986).
He is a host of the show “Amanpour and Company” on PBS and CNN and a contributor to CNBC.
He serves on the board of United Airlines, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Society of American Historians, Halliburton Labs, The New Orleans City Planning Commission, and My Brother’s Keeper Alliance. He is an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg, a financial services firm based in New York City.
About our Performer(s):
Kris Bowers is an Academy Award® winning filmmaker and an Emmy, Grammy, and Oscar-nominated composer and pianist. His 2024 score for DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot garnered widespread acclaim, including nominations from the Academy Awards®, Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice Awards, and BAFTAs, as well as the award for Outstanding Original Score for a Studio Film from the Society of Composers and Lyricists (SCL).
Bowers won his first Academy Award® for his 2023 documentary short film The Last Repair Shop. Co-directed with Ben Proudfoot, the Breakwater Studios produced film spotlights some of the individuals working at the Los Angeles Unified School District music instrument repair shop, the last to provide free instrument repairs to the city’s public school students.
Bowers blends his classical and jazz roots to discover new frontiers in music and film. Recently, Bowers has delivered genre-defying scores for Paramount’s biopic Bob Marley: One Love, Ava DuVernay’s Origin, as well as Warner Bros.’ The Color Purple and King Richard, among others. Bowers has also composed music for television series When They See Us, Mrs. America, and in 2017 won a Daytime Emmy for his score to The Snowy Day. Since 2020, Bowers has scored Netflix’s hit series Bridgerton.
