Adrienne Arsht

The granddaughter of immigrants who fled Ukraine for a better life, Adrienne Arsht was born in 1942 in Delaware. Her parents, both attorneys, provided a home for her and her younger sister that embraced their community, education, and the arts. “I was greatly influenced by my parents,” she says. “They were the pillars of my life. I admired their keen intelligence and interest in community. My mother, like Don Quixote, tilted at windmills and like Joan of Arc was willing to die for a cause.”

Arsht was impatient to complete her education. She skipped her senior year in high school and began her undergraduate degree at Mount Holyoke— the only school that accepted her without a high school diploma.

Becoming a lawyer was always Arsht’s plan for her future, even though there were few women entering law in the 1960s. Surprisingly, the law school at the University of Pennsylvania—her parents’ law school alma mater—rejected her application. The dean of the school told her parents they would rather accept a man as he would do more with his education.

Determined, Arsht attended Villanova University Law School, where she was one of only five female students in her class of 300. “My male classmates pretty much ignored me,” she says. Arsht completed her degree in 1966 and became the 11th woman to join the Delaware bar. Her mother had been the fifth and was the state’s first female judge.

Arsht began her career as an attorney at Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell in 1966. Three years later, her younger sister, Alison, was serving as a foreign- service officer in Moscow. She was arrested by the KGB and accused of being a spy. Eventually, she was released and sent back to the United States. “This experience shattered my sister,” says Arsht. “Today, we would say she was experiencing PTSD, but we didn’t know that at the time. Within a year of being home, she committed suicide at the age of 29.”

Arsht had grown up in a home where classical music always played in the background. Her mother played piano, and every Saturday the family listened to the Texaco broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera. As an adult, Arsht continued the tradition of playing classical music in her own home. Following her sister’s death, however, she stopped listening to music for a number of years. During that time, she thought a lot about resilience. How would she have reacted had the roles with her sister been reversed? Would she have been able to overcome the trauma? “This is when I began to realize the importance resilience plays in our lives,” she says. “To have strength in the face of adversity is a large part of being able to move forward in life.”

Arsht had been working in her father’s firm, and her mother was serving as a judge in the building across the street. She decided to go where her name wasn’t as recognizable, and moved to New York City to serve as an attorney at Trans World Airways (TWA).

She remembers a time when the president of TWA hosted a lunch for the attorneys at The Union League Club, which at that time did not allow women to enter through the front door. She attempted the entryway with her colleagues, only to be turned away and told to enter through the kitchen. There were many other incidents of gender discrimination during the time she worked as a corporate attorney. “In those days, I didn’t even know that my treatment could be a class action suit,” she says. She learned at an early age, however, that being part of a minority—or nondominant as she prefers to label it—was how she would function. “To me,” she says, “adversity is simply an obstacle that you deal with by moving around it and putting one foot in front of the other.”

After 10 years at TWA, Arsht left to work for a law firm in Washington, D.C. A short time later, she founded Land Title and Escrow, where she served as the chairman, CEO, and president.

In 1996, Arsht moved to Miami to run her family-owned bank, TotalBank. The fact that she had no banking experience did not trouble her. “Whenever I’ve wanted to summon courage, I think of my mother,” she says. “She was brave. I’m a student of famous quotes and one of my favorites is from Kurt Vonnegut, who said, ‘You have to be constantly jumping off and developing your wings on the way down.’ That is what I did.”

Under her leadership, TotalBank grew from four locations to 14 with more than $1.4 billion in assets. In 2007, she sold the bank to Banco Popular Español, and Arsht was named chairman emerita of TotalBank. Since then, she works full time as a policy advocate and philanthropist.

Her $30 million contribution to Miami’s Performing Arts Center in 2008 secured its financial footing. In her honor, the Center was renamed the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County. In 2012, her contribution of $10 million to Lincoln Center was recognized with the dedication of the Adrienne Arsht Stage in Alice Tully Hall. Recently, Arsht donated $5 million to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City to fund the museum’s first-ever paid internship program, which is now named the Adrienne Arsht Interns. With Arsht’s gift, The Met is now the single largest art museum in the country to offer 100 percent paid internships to nearly 120 undergraduate and graduate interns each year. The transformative donation also supports MetLiveArts, providing programming focused on themes of resilience.

In 2016, Arsht spearheaded the creation of the Adrienne Arsht Center for Resilience at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., which was renamed in 2019, the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center with the $30 million Rockefeller Foundation gift that she matched. At the Atlantic Council, she founded the Adrienne Arsht National Security Resilience Initiative as well as the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center to focus on the role of South America in the trans-Atlantic community. Arsht is a Trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts where she established the Adrienne Arsht Theater Fund.

In 2019, Arsht was awarded The Order of Rio Branco from the Brazilian government for her outstanding dedication to U.S.-Brazil relations and her vision toward Latin America. In 2017, she was bestowed the Carnegie Hall Medal of Excellence recognizing her visionary and exceptional contributions to cultural and nonprofit institutions nationally. She is the only woman to have ever received this distinction. Additionally, Arsht was awarded the distinguished Order of San Carlos of Colombia, which was given to her by the direction of Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos. In 2013, Arsht was presented with the prestigious diplomatic honor, Orden de Isabel la Católica (Order of the Cross of Isabella the Catholic), from The King of Spain.

In October 2024, Arsht was awarded—on behalf of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky—with the Order of Princess Olga for her significant and personal contribution to the strengthening of cooperation between Ukraine and the U.S.

Adrienne Arsht believes that time on earth is a gift and says, “The rent we pay for that is how we give back to make the world a better place. I learned that from my parents.”

Much of her philanthropy focuses on the arts. “I think the arts define us as a civilization. It’s what carries on from generation to generation,” Arsht says. “I also focus support on the Hispanic population in Delaware. My grandparents fled Ukraine. I think about the loneliness they faced, the loss, the economic issues, their language barriers, the prejudices, the risks they took, their entrepreneurialism, and their grit. That’s why I want to help new arrivals. That is the American story, and it makes me feel blessed to make a difference in these lives.”

When asked how she feels about her Horatio Alger Award, she says, “It’s an honor just to be nominated. In reviewing the membership list, I am humbled at the names I see of those who have come before me. It makes me want to do my best to impart what I can to my fellow Members and to the Scholars. I want young people to know that when they are confronted with an obstacle, nothing is accomplished by staying in place. Figure out a new plan, and if it doesn’t work, take another path. There is always another path forward.”