Gianna Angelopoulos
Donor
Mrs Angelopoulos is a lawyer, former parliamentarian, Ambassador at large of the Greek state and best-selling author.
In 1986, Ambassador Angelopoulos was elected to the Athens Municipal Council. In 1989, she was elected to the Greek Parliament and won re-election the following year. Following her marriage to Theodore Angelopoulos, Gianna resigned her seat in the Parliament to focus on family and business.
In 1996, Costas Simitis, the Prime Minister of Greece at the time, appointed her to lead the country’s successful campaign to host the 2004 Olympic Games. In 2000, when slow progress and gridlocked bureaucracy put Athens in danger of losing the Games, she was asked to assume the Presidency of the Athens 2004 Organising Committee and save the project.
Her memoir, My Greek Drama, was published by Greenleaf Book Group in May 2013, and became a top ten New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller.
At Harvard, Mrs Angelopoulos has served as Vice-Chairman of the Dean’s Council of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (HKS) since 1994 and now also serves as a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Business and Government.
In 2011, she established the Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Program at the HKS to bring distinguished leaders to Harvard in order to interact with students, share lessons learned and reflect upon the next phase of their public service. Former President Felipe Calderón of Mexico, Former President Tarja Halonen of Finland, Former President and Nobel Laureate Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the UN have participated in the programme to date.
Mrs Angelopoulos is the founder and sponsor of the Angelopoulos Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) Fellowship Program (100 young Greek entrepreneurs have benefitted), and a leading philanthropist for projects in Greece and around the globe.
In 2019, Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis appointed her as President of the ‘Greece 2021’ Committee for the celebrations of the 200 years since the Greek Revolution and the birth of the modern Greek state.