The team behind the Aspen Ideas Festival brings together big thinkers to address critical ideas and complex global issues.
Since 2005, scientists, authors, scholars, economists, entrepreneurs, artists and politicians have been gathering in the Roaring Fork Valley in June at the Aspen Ideas Festival for thought-provoking discussions and debates. Off-stage, conversations unfold between speakers and event-goers on footpaths or over espressos. The festival attracts 3,000 attendees, but with a curated lineup of speakers at venues big and small, in town and on the Aspen Institute’s campus, the event feels intimate and impactful.
But what most folks don’t know is this: The Aspen-based management team that curates the festival’s 200 presentations and workshops over ten days is entirely made up of women. If there’s a glass ceiling at Fortune 500 companies, the sky’s the limit with the Aspen Ideas Festival.
The women behind the event are all intellectually curious, and they bring complementary skill sets to the table, from content curation to research to nuts-and-bolts planning. “There are so many moving parts, whether it’s getting the AV working or picking up speakers from the airport,” says Executive Director Kitty Boone. It’s true that women tend to dominate the nonprofit landscape, but the AIF team isn’t intentionally “a gals’ club,” Boone says. “We work with a diverse group of advisors—and that group includes men. We value all our AIF contributors, regardless of gender.”
The Aspen Ideas Festival builds a series of conversations with thought leaders about critical ideas that face the globe, whether it’s energy issues, domestic politics or global economics.
Tricia Johnson, AIF’s editorial director, suggests the team’s success may have more to do with having women at the top than having an all-woman team. “Kitty Boone has really set the tone on this, creating a rich environment for exploring ideas. Even with someone who’s really junior, Kitty wants to hear from them equally,” Johnson says. “It’s not like we’ve never had men on staff, but there is a wonderful spirit of collaboration,” she says. “And there’s no mansplaining.”
At this year’s festival, Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist John Mather, who heads up the Webb Telescope project, will share views of the universe. Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, co-authors of The Age of AI (2021), will discuss artificial intelligence here on Earth—and why they have serious reservations about it. New this year, the Pavement Art project, inspired by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Asphalt Arts initiative, will invite the community to join a featured artist in painting an intersection in town. The festival kicks off with Aspen Ideas: Health (June 21-24), followed by two festival sections (June 24-27 and 27-30). Aspen Ideas Festival passes are on sale at AspenIdeas.org. Individual tickets to more than 30 sessions will be available on AspenShowTix.com on June 15. Here’s a look at a few of the women who are instrumental in orchestrating the Aspen Ideas Festival.
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Kitty Boone
Kitty Boone has been a force of nature on the Aspen Ideas team since the event’s inception.
In 1985, Kitty Boone earned a unique degree at Yale called a master’s in public and private management, which led to gigs in public television and corporate responsibility. “My heart was really into the big ideas around society,” says Boone, who has been a part of the AIF team since the event’s inception. In her early 30s, Boone arrived in Aspen, having been recruited to do marketing for the Aspen Skiing Company. She organized events like the 24 Hours of Aspen and World Cup races, worked on ad campaigns and helped launch the company’s first website.
In 2013, Yo-Yo Ma accompanied Lance Cpl. Timothy Donley in “America the Beautiful,” an indelible moment for AIF’s Kitty Boone
Ready for new challenges, Boone took a job with the Aspen Institute in 2003. “When Walter Isaacson got hired, one of his first conversations with employees was about opening up the doors of the Aspen Institute and inviting the public into discussions about the big ideas of our time,” Boone says. “It was a phone call—before Zoom—but I was putting my hand up. I knew the local attitude was that the Institute was exclusive. There was this aura of mystery about it.”
Jessica Alba and Whitney Wolfe Herd at the 2022 session, “Women at the Top: How Bumble and Honest are Paving the Way.”
Dignitaries like Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright have headlined the Aspen Ideas Festival. “We’re able to recruit these remarkable speakers, but it’s the innovators who nobody really knows about who are changing the world.”
A 2015 session paired jazz musicians Jon Batiste (on piano) and Wynton Marsalis, making for Tricia Johnson’s favorite festival moment
FAVORITE AIF MOMENT: In 2013, world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma accompanied Lance Cpl. Timothy Donley, a Marine who lost his legs in an IED explosion in Afghanistan, in a rendition of “America the Beautiful.” Donley discovered he could sing at Walter Reed as part of MusiCorps, a program for wounded veterans. “I’m telling you, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” Boone says. “It was unbelievable.”
AIF’s Katie Cassetta says she loves speakers like Julia Marsh, co-founder of Sway, which makes plastic bags out of seaweed (shown here presenting in 2019).
MANAGING DIRECTOR: Killeen Brettmann
Since 2013, Killeen Brettmann has been heading up marketing, budgeting, productions and sponsorships for the festival. “Everybody wants to develop sessions, manage the content and talk with the speakers. Obviously, that’s the fun part of the job,” Brettmann says. But the festival is a massive undertaking from a production side. There’s fundraising, selling passes and flying in speakers. “There are a gazillion details that go into it,” she says.
Killeen Brettmann (shown here with Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal) loves when the AIF lineup brings together unexpected voices. “We paired Jessica Alba, founder of Honest Beauty, and Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd. It was amazing,” she says.
Like Boone, Brettmann worked for years at the Aspen Skiing Company in PR, communications and, eventually, events. “I brought in the X Games in 2002, for better or worse,” she says. Brettmann also helped build the Fiji Water brand back when it was a startup. “I was doing everything from ad campaigns to lugging cases of water to Clark’s,” she says.
“The Ideas Festival is a logisticathon of epic proportions. We have 300 speakers and 12 to 15 different venues,” Brettmann says. “This speaker can do Tuesday, but we want him with a moderator who’s coming on Thursday—the schedule’s like a Rubik’s Cube.”
FAVORITE AIF MOMENT:“I love the diversity of topics and speakers. In the same year, we had [then vice president] Joe Biden on the main stage and earlier in the week, Stephen Jones with Washington State University’s The Bread Lab was talking about ancient grains and white bread,” she says. “It’s something obscure that you wouldn’t expect.”
Tricia Johnson loves exploring topics she knows little about. “Learning something new is a delicious challenge that satiates your curiosity,” she says.
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR: Tricia Johnson
As a journalist, Tricia Johnson cut her teeth by covering the Oscars and the Grammys for Entertainment Weekly in LA. But that glitzy job felt like a mismatch. “I grew up in a bluecollar town in New Mexico,” Johnson says. “I wasn’t enmeshed in pop culture.” She pivoted to freelance writing, moving to Aspen so she could also mountain bike and ski.
For the festival, Johnson initially served as the project editor on the event’s program guide. “It was a behemoth with 180 pages of speaker bios and short-form stories,” she says. As the Institute moved further away from printed material, Johnson turned toward digital content—the festival’s website, mobile app and the flagship podcast Aspen Ideas To Go.“It’s a way to take our on-stage sessions and turn them into something that’s really curated for the listener,” she says.
Reflecting on her time at EW, Johnson says it taught her that people are approachable. “Having to walk up to George Clooney at a movie premiere party and ask him who he’s dating takes away any fear,” she says. While the topics covered at AIF, from geopolitics to climate change, have more gravitas, being comfortable engaging with celebrities translates to her work with AIF speakers. “I’m very happy to tell [physics professor and author of The Elegant Universe] Brian Greene, ‘I don’t know anything about astrophysics,’” she says. “At the end of the day, it’s really about the curiosity that we all share.”
FAVORITE AIF MOMENT: In 2015, a session called “The Genius of Jazz” featured Jon Batiste on piano, Wynton Marsalis on trumpet and Walter Isaacson as moderator, exploring the genre’s history. “They were just riffing on their instruments and talking. You could see the rapport they had,” says Johnson. There were 700 people in the Greenwald Pavilion, but it felt like you were eavesdropping on an intimate conversation. “It was magical.”
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR: Katie Cassetta
After College, Katie Cassetta went to work on a Wyoming ranch as a wrangler, an experience that solidified a love for the West. In her mid-20s, she started a nonprofit focused on women’s empowerment in Nepal, raising funds for water systems, financial cooperatives and education. “That set me up well to work at the Institute, where we spend our time tackling thorny issues, from health to education to climate change,” Cassetta says.
She spends half her time at the Institute working on Aspen Ideas Climate, a major new initiative held in Miami Beach in early March. “As an outdoorswoman, I’ve guided in Wilderness areas, and I’ve rock climbed all over the world,” she says. “I think it’s a lot easier to go to work every day when the issues you’re focused on impact you personally.”
Katie Cassetta gets a close-up view of an owl during a panel on new discoveries about the remarkable brains of birds.
For this summer’s festival, Cassetta is curating content for a clean energy track titled “Powering the Future.” She works to cultivate relationships with politicians on both sides of the aisle to discuss climate change. “Bringing political balance to the event is not always easy, but it’s critical to our mission as a nonpartisan organization,” she says. Aspen Ideas brings in speakers like Rep. John Curtis, a congressman from Utah. “As the chair of the Conservative Climate Caucus, he’s a good example of the kind of guy that we want on our stages, talking about why environmental issues matter to red communities in rural America,” Cassetta says. “And reminding our audiences that it’s hard to hate up close.”
FAVORITE AIF MOMENT: “My favorite part of the work is not about the big names and celebrities (I mean, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a legend, obviously), but it’s about finding people who are on the rise,” Cassetta says. She points to Julia Marsh, the co-founder and CEO of Sway, a startup that makes compostable alternatives to plastic bags out of seaweed. Marsh presented at AIF in 2019 as a Ph.D. student.
In addition to the Aspen Ideas Festival veterans profiled here, a handful of up-and-comers help put the event together. We caught up with two of them for a fresh perspective on the job—and being part of an all-woman team.
Maya Kobe-Rundio
Maya Kobe-Rundio, Associate Digital Editor
My background is in humanities research, so I love that the job keeps me engaged in interdisciplinary learning while challenging me to confront my blind spots. Having such extraordinary female mentors is invaluable. I feel like I can bring my full self to work. I’m pushed and challenged in my role while being encouraged to take on new projects that light my fire, all in an environment where I feel safe and valued.
Ava Hartmann
Ava Hartmann, Program Manager
The engaging part of the job is having conversations about potential conversations: talking with coworkers about the current state of the world and discovering interesting voices. I love watching an idea shape-shift through collaboration and research—and then take on its own life on stage in June. In a job that requires so much ideation and communication between team members, having an all-female team creates a really open space to share ideas. I often forget we’re an all-woman team! I feel lucky that this feels so normal, recognizing that it is not.
Photography by: PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ASPEN INSTITUTE
