Kennedy Center president Deborah Rutter to step down later this year

Deborah F. Rutter will step down as president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts at the end of 2025 after steering the arts institution for 11 years, through three presidents and a global pandemic. One of Washington’s most prominent arts leaders, she oversaw the center’s first physical expansion, sought to diversify the artforms it showcases and opened a permanent exhibit honoring its namesake: President John F. Kennedy.

Rutter announced her decision to the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees on Monday afternoon.

“I don’t feel excited,” Rutter, 68, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “If anything, I feel kind of sad. But I know that this is the right time.”

“She lives and breathes the Kennedy Center 24 hours a day,” said David M. Rubenstein, 75, the philanthropist and Carlyle Group co-founder who has been chairman of the center’s board of trustees since 2010 — and who has his own plans to step down in September 2026.

The original plan was for Rubenstein to step down in 2025, which the center announced last January. Rutter would then have helped show the new chairman the ropes before leaving herself. But in late November 2024, after a search for his replacement came up empty, Rubenstein said he would stay on until September 2026. So the plan reversed: With Rutter’s departure, Rubenstein will be able to help recruit her successor and help them take on the role.

“It’s really important for us to make sure that we have the right kind of continuity,” Rutter said. “This is a large, complex organization, and it takes a good while to understand it.”

Across its several stages, the center presents more than 2,000 performances a year. Roughly 2 million people visit each year.

Spencer Stuart, a consulting firm, assisted with the board’s search committee while seeking Rubenstein’s successor and will assist with the search for Rutter’s successor. The board of trustees ultimately votes to select the new president.

And, no, to ward off the obvious question: Rutter said her decision isn’t related to the arrival of the second Trump administration. President Donald Trump notably broke tradition from previous presidents by not attending the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony throughout his first term in office.

“This is not related to the politics of who’s in the White House. The Kennedy Center is truly nonpartisan,” Rutter said. “… Frankly, for the last six years, I’ve had almost all Trump appointees as my board members. And we’ve had a fantastic era with them.”

Now, Rutter added, the makeup is split more evenly between Trump and Biden’s appointees. Before leaving the White House, Biden appointed several new members to the board of trustees, bucking tradition by not publicly announcing them.

Among the new board members are former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre; former Obama senior White House aide Stephanie Cutter; and Evan Ryan, the former White House Cabinet secretary and wife of former secretary of state Antony Blinken. Also appointed to the board were musician Jon Batiste and event planner Bryan Rafanelli. (See the full list of newly appointed board members below.)

Rutter became the first woman to serve as president of the Kennedy Center in 2014, after spending 11 years as the president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She is the arts institution’s third president, succeeding Lawrence J. Wilker (1991 to 2001) and Michael M. Kaiser (2001 to 2014). Before 1991, daily operations were overseen by the board and its chair.

She also held leadership roles at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony Orchestra, where she oversaw the construction of Benaroya Hall, a 2,500-seat venue that serves as the orchestra’s home.

“I have some weird thing about 11,” Rutter said. “I was in Seattle for 11 years. I was in Chicago for 11 years. And I’ll have been here for 11 years. I never knew 11 was a fancy good-luck number, but apparently it is.”

Rutter’s tenure fell, more or less, into three acts. She guided the center through its first true physical expansion, then sudden programming retraction and staff reduction as it weathered the coronavirus pandemic, and finally a period of rebuilding.

In her first year with the Kennedy Center, Rutter began overseeing its first addition, which was announced in 2013 by Kaiser, her predecessor. The Reach, a sprawling $250 million complex designed by Steven Holl Architects that sits just to the south of the center’s imposing 1971 main structure, opened in September 2019.

Among other things, the Reach allows the public a peek behind the curtain. It has studios where the public can watch some artists rehearse, for example, and serves as a venue for relatively intimate performances. It also includes a plaza for outdoor events such as concerts and movie screenings and a cafe and coffee bar.

From 2015 to 2024, the center fundraised $867 million under Rutter — in addition to the $250 million raised for the Reach.

Rutter sought to expand the center’s mission along with its physical space, displaying considerable interest in how the arts intersect with other aspects of daily life. Most notably during her tenure, the center partnered with the National Institutes of Health, the National Education Association and the University of California at San Francisco to widen the Sound Health Network, a program that promotes research on the intersection of music and health.

“The one word I really want to emphasize with her is ‘empowering,’” says Renée Fleming, the esteemed opera singer and Kennedy Center Honoree who serves as an adviser at large to the organization and helped found and lead the Sound Health Network. “She really understands how to empower us to achieve the vision that we have as artists or in a project, initiative or relationship with the audience.”

Rutter also made several leadership changes within the organization. She helped turn around a struggling National Symphony Orchestra by hiring Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda as its music director. She sought to expand the diversity of the center’s focus by making hip-hop a pillar of its programming and naming Q-Tip, of the influential hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest, as its first artistic director of hip-hop culture in 2016, a move Washington Post pop music critic Chris Richards called both “refreshing” and a “no-brainer.”

“Her legacy will be that she helped transition us from a more traditional performing arts center to one that was open to a lot of different opportunities, like the Reach, like getting involved with different types of art forms we haven’t been involved with before, like hip-hop,” Rubenstein said.

“What she does best is she democratizes culture,” said Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. “She makes sure that the culture she cares about, whether it’s orchestra or theater, is really made accessible to a wider audience. And she sees … that you can tell a lot about a country by how democratic it is when it comes to its culture. She’s really been one of the leaders reminding people there shouldn’t be high or low culture. There should be culture that shapes all Americans.”

Finally, Rutter oversaw the opening of “Arts & Ideals: President John F. Kennedy” — focused on the art institution’s namesake and of which Rutter is “deeply, deeply proud” — which the center describes as “an immersive, permanent 7,500 square-foot exhibit exploring President Kennedy’s connection to arts and culture” that has attracted nearly a million visitors.

David Bohnett, the co-founder of GeoCities and a past board member and head of the center’s Honors Committee, calls Rutter a “noble person and a noble leader.”

“In addition to the job, which would already be an extraordinary accomplishment for anyone, in her free time, she practices piano,” Fleming said. “And she didn’t play this instrument until she started at the Kennedy Center.”

The pandemic proved to be perhaps Rutter’s biggest challenge. The Kennedy Center was closed to the public for nearly 18 months, during which the federal government awarded the center a $25 million grant as part of the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act.

Meanwhile, both Rutter and the center drew criticism for laying off or furloughing employees during the pandemic. Rutter waived her $1.2 million salary during the pandemic, telling The Post in March 2020: “It’s a leadership issue. This is what a leader does.”

The Kennedy Center is funded by a mixture of government-appropriated funds, private donations and revenue from ticket sales. Its operating budget in 2024 was $268 million. Of that, roughly $125 million came from earned revenue, such as ticket sales, $95 million from private donations and fundraising and $45 million from federal appropriations, with another $4 million drawn from its endowment.

While much of the scheduled programming was canceled during the pandemic, the center held a reinvented version of its Kennedy Center Honors, arguably its most anticipated annual event.

The 43rd celebration — which honored singer Joan Baez, country musician Garth Brooks, dancer-choreographer-actor Debbie Allen, violinist Midori and actor Dick Van Dyke — was taped in segments over three days in various parts of the center, some in front of a small, socially distanced crowd. The program aired on CBS.

It was credited, like so much art during that difficult year, as a balm. It contained everything Rutter wants from the arts: empathy, curiosity and joy.

“I think that those three words … are really the guiding personal attributes of the work that we do that are really important,” she said.

And plans for this final year?

“To live through it,” Rubenstein said.

“Mostly I am going to take my time to figure out where my skills and my curiosity and my fervent belief that the arts really can save lives because it really does build community and empathy, where else can I dedicate that,” Rutter said.

Here is a complete list of the newly appointed Kennedy Center board of trustees members: