The Folger Shakespeare Library is administered by a Board of Governors under the auspices of Amherst College, founder Henry Clay Folger’s alma mater.
D. Jarrett Arp
Board of Governors Chair Since 2022, Member Since 2015
D. Jarrett Arp is a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell. Mr. Arp heads the firm’s Washington DC office and focuses on antitrust and competition law counseling, investigations, and litigation before trial and appellate courts.
Florence H. Cohen
Board of Governors Vice Chair since 2022, Member since 2014
Florence “Flo” Cohen’s taught 8th grade English and social studies in Redmond, Oregon before embarking on a career in public relations and marketing communications. In the not-for-profit sector, she worked for The University of Chicago Press, The University of Chicago Magazine, and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest.
Eugene Pinkard, Jr.
Board of Governors Vice Chair since 2022, Member since 2020
Eugene “Gene” Pinkard, Jr. serves as Director, K-12 Leadership for the Aspen Institute Education & Society Program. A longtime educator and leader, he leads urban district network strategy, supporting superintendents and other education leaders as they deepen their learning and improvement strategies.
Richard D. Batchelder, Jr.
Board of Governors Member since 2021
Richard Batchelder is a Senior Counsel at Ropes & Gray in Boston, following a 30-year career as a partner in the litigation department. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Cornell Law School.
Sir Simon Russell Beale, CBE
Board of Governors Member since 2014
Sir Simon Russell Beale, CBE is an English stage and film actor. He began his professional career in the late 1980s with the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing mostly comedic roles. In the early ‘90s he was invited to play Konstantin in a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, helping him broaden his range into dramatic roles as well.
Jeff Bleich
Board of Governors Member since 2020
Jeff Bleich currently serves as the Chief Legal & Policy Officer of Cruise LLC. He previously served as a Special Master for the U.S. Courts, arbitrator, and as the chair of the boards of PG&E Co. and Nuix USG, Inc. He formerly served as special counsel to President Obama in the White House, and as the 24th U.S. Ambassador to Australia from 2009 to 2013.
Rebecca Bushnell
Board of Governors Member since 2015
Rebecca Bushnell is the School of Arts and Sciences Board of Advisors Emerita Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She received a BA from Swarthmore, an MA from Bryn Mawr, and a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from Princeton University.
Vinton G. Cerf
Board of Governors Member since 2015
Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google. Cerf has held positions at MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Stanford University, UCLA and IBM.
Beth Cisneros
Mary Elizabeth Cisneros is an attorney at Holland & Knight representing charitable organizations primarily in trust and estate matters.
Debbie Driesman
Board of Governors Member since 2018
Debbie Driesman has lived in the Washington DC area for the past four decades, having grown up in Ontario, Canada.
She worked as a computer engineer in NASA’s communication division at Goddard Space Flight Center until she retired in 1999 to oversee the construction of a home. She and her husband Frank Islam have since built another new home in Potomac, MD. Ms. Driesman is the Vice President of the Frank Islam and Debbie Driesman Foundation.
Chris Foster
Board of Governors Member since 2022
Since June 2021, Chris Foster has been CEO of Omnicom Public Relations Group in New York. He was previously DC-based North American President of advertising and public relations agency Burson Cohn & Wolfe, formed by the merger of Cohn & Wolfe and Burson-Marsteller (of which he was global executive vice president).
Susan Sachs Goldman
Board of Governors Member since 2020, Previous Member 2008-2019
Writer and civic volunteer Susan Goldman is a native Washingtonian who has been a lover of the Folger Library her whole life. She is a historian, whose book, Friends in Deed: The Story of Quaker Social Reform in America, was published in 2012. She is currently working on a project on the history of the District of Columbia.
Rosa Joshi
Board of Governors Member since 2020
Rosa Joshi is a director, producer, and professor whose focus ranges from classical Shakespeare to modern classics and contemporary works. She is committed to reclaiming and reimagining the classics and particularly Shakespeare, for a new generation of artists and audience. Rosa is a co-founder of upstart crow collective, a company that produces classical plays with diverse casts of women and non-binary people.
Derek Kaufman
Board of Governors Member since 2018
Derek Kaufman is actively engaged in philanthropy, public policy advocacy, and investing.
From 2008 until 2015, he was Head of Global Fixed Income at the hedge fund Citadel and a member of the firm’s Portfolio Committee.
Prior to joining Citadel, Mr. Kaufman was a Managing Director and Global Head of Fixed Income in the Proprietary Positioning Business at JPMorgan Chase. He started at J.P. Morgan in 1996.
Marty Kuehne
Board of Governors Member since 2022
Marty Kuehne is Managing Director of Seabury Accenture, specializing in workforce planning and compensation. In 2017, Accenture, an IT consulting and services company, acquired Seabury Group, a firm focused on aviation. Before it was acquired, Marty had more than eight years of experience at the Seabury Group.
Kimberlyn Rachael Leary
Board of Governors Member since 2022
Kimberlyn Leary is a senior vice president, managing research and program development across the Urban Institute. She comes to Urban from Harvard University, where she is an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, an associate professor in the department of health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and was a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
J. May Liang
Board of Governors Member since 2014, Previous Chair from 2019-2022
May Liang is General Counsel and Chief Financial Officer for OpenConcept Systems, Inc., a mobile conference app development company. Previously, Ms. Liang served as General Counsel and Chief Financial Officer for Total Music, LLC a digital entertainment service.
Sir Charles Roxburgh, KCB
Board of Governors Member since 2020
Sir Charles Roxburgh is a non-executive director of Shell PLC and the Chair of Legal and General America. Until June 2022, he was the Second Permanent Secretary at Her Majesty’s Treasury. He took up this position in July 2016 and stepped down in June 2022. In this role, he was responsible, at the Treasury, for all issues relating to growth, productivity, infrastructure, financial services and financial stability.
Paul Smith
Board of Governors Member since 2018
Paul M. Smith is a Professor at Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches Constitutional Law and Election Law. He is also the Senior Vice President for Litigation and Strategy at the Campaign Legal Center. Paul works directly with CLC’s talented team of litigators to protect and improve our democracy through innovative litigation and advocacy.
Aida Sukys
Board of Governors Member since 2022
Aida Sukys is an experienced accomplished corporate financial executive. She is currently the Chief Financial Officer at The Hilb Group, an insurance brokerage specializing in property & casualty, employee benefits, and retirement services to business and individuals.
Ramie Targoff
Board of Governors Member since 2019
Ramie Targoff is the Jehuda Reinharz Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University, where she is also professor of English and co-chair of Italian Studies. Her scholarly area of interest is the English Renaissance, with a strong secondary interest in the Italian Renaissance.
Ayanna Thompson
Board of Governors Member since 2021
Ayanna Thompson is a Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, and the Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). In 2021, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Michael Witmore
Director
Dr. Witmore was appointed the seventh director of the Folger on July 1, 2011. Upon his arrival, he worked with the Board of Governors to draft a Strategic Plan for the institution, adopted in June 2013. He was formerly professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and before that he served as associate professor of English and assistant professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.