Adrienne Arsht is a business leader and impact philanthropist. She has taken a leading role promoting artistic, business, and civic growth. Her thirty-million-dollar 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 ten million dollars to the Lincoln Center was recognized with the dedication of the Adrienne Arsht Stage in Alice Tully Hall.
Arsht also donated five million dollars to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to fund the museum’s first ever paid internship program and ten million dollars to fund METLIVE Arts programming. With her gift, the Met is the single largest art museum in the country to offer 100 percent paid internships.
In Washington in 2016, Arsht spearheaded the creation of the Adrienne Arsht Center for Resilience at the Atlantic Council, which was renamed in 2019 the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, with the thirty-million-dollar Rockefeller Foundation gift that she matched. She also founded, in 2013, the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center at the Atlantic Council to focus on the role of Latin America and the Caribbean in the transatlantic community, and in April 2022, she endowed that center with a twenty-five-million-dollar donation.
Recently, Arsht donated ten million dollars to the Smithsonian Institution to launch the Adrienne Arsht Community-Based Resilience Solutions Initiative, a multiyear program to research tropical resilience and educate the public about the role resilience plays in shaping the world.
Arsht is a trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where she established the Adrienne Arsht Theater Fund. In addition to serving as executive vice chairman of the Atlantic Council, she is honorary trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and trustee emerita of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She is a member of the National Advisory Board of the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for American Democracy and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Arsht is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, a graduate of Villanova Law School, and a member of the Delaware Bar.