Wallis Annenberg

Since becoming chairman of the board, president, and CEO of the Annenberg Foundation in 2009, Wallis Annenberg has helped transform and bolster the arts and humanities in public life, especially in her adopted home of Los Angeles. As she proudly told the Beverly Hills Courier in 2019, “L.A. is as diverse, as creative, as driven, as dynamic a city as you will find on this earth.” And that current reputation is in part due to the visionary philanthropy of Wallis Annenberg. 

She was born in Philadelphia in 1939 to Walter Hubert Annenberg and his first wife, Bernice Veronica Dunkelman, and grew up living both at her mother’s house in Washington, D.C., and at her father’s estate near Philly. She graduated fourth in her class from Pine Manor Junior College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1959, and was set to attend Columbia University in the fall. But that summer her plans changed. In Venice, during a celebratory European trip, she met Seth Weingarten, a Princeton grad starting medical school at Yale. They were married a year later. Wallis and Seth had three sons and a daughter, settled in California, and divorced in 1975. 

Annenberg’s father expanded a media empire started by his father, Moses, who began by owning the Daily Racing Form and then the Philadelphia Inquirer. When Walter Annenberg sold Triangle Publications to Rupert Murdoch for $3 billion in 1988, it also included TV Guide and Seventeen magazine. With a third of the proceeds, he established the Annenberg Foundation, “committed to core values of responsiveness, accessibility, fairness, and involvement.” He died in 2002, handing over the leadership of the foundation to his second wife, Lee, until she passed in 2009, when Wallis Annenberg took the reins. Three of her children sit with her on the board of the foundation. 

Under Wallis Annenberg’s leadership, the foundation has reached more than 2,700 mostly nonprofit organizations through what is now more than $5 billion in giving. Among the projects that Annenberg prides herself in is the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, which opened in 2013. The Wallis, as it is called, is much more than a performance space—it is a cultural hub for the community to experience film, theater, dance, music, and also engage in arts education and participate in art making. The 70,000 square-foot facility got its start with a $25 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation. “By creating a world-class center for the performing arts, we preserved and restored the old post office, a real part of Beverly Hills history,” she told the Courier. “We established a new venue for great performances and productions. And we found a way to engage the whole community—to enable them to actually practice the arts.” 

A gift from the Annenberg Foundation to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) established the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography, allowing the museum to acquire and store the 3,500-piece Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, which includes masterworks by Ansel Adams, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Steichen, W. H. Fox Talbot, and Edward Weston, among others. Photography is a particular passion for Annenberg: “What’s great about the best photography is that it takes you deep inside the emotion of a moment,” she said to the Courier. Michael Govan, the Wallis Annenberg director of LACMA, explained to Vanity Fair in 2009 that “Wallis has that sense of big, civic, long-term investments.”   

When the Courier asked how she chooses projects to support, Annenberg answered, “It starts with a deep connection to the cause. I have to give from my heart, first and foremost. Which is why I’ve been focused on issues like women’s empowerment, engaging people in the visual and performing arts, strengthening the human-animal bond. Things that really matter to me.” In addition to her philanthropy for museums and performing arts, Annenberg helped build the Annenberg Community Beach House, a public recreation and sports facility geared toward the entire community, the Wallis Annenberg GenSpace for wellness and lifelong learning for older populations in L.A., and, more recently, support for teachers and parents to navigate the challenges of children and social media through Learner.org. The work, innovation, and giving of Annenberg shows no sign of letting up. 

As Annenberg told the Courier, “Some people believe the Declaration of Independence mentions ‘the pursuit of happiness’ precisely because it can’t be achieved because it’s a goal we’ll always be striving for. I feel the same way about our Foundation’s goals. Women’s equality. Economic opportunity. Engagement with the arts. These are journeys, not destinations.”

 —Amy Lifson