Karen Avery ’83: A Mild-Mannered Powerhouse

Karen Avery '83 helps lead searches for the heads of prominent cultural and educational institutions. She has worked in admissions at Harvard, raised millions of dollars for the Smithsonian, and helped deliver PBS programming to underserved communities. Her network includes some of the most influential philanthropists.

Given her credentials in executive search, philanthropy, fundraising, and higher education – and two Harvard degrees – it would be natural to picture an intense and driven executive.

Instead?  

“I love to cook. I love wine. I love my dog,” Avery, 60, said by phone from her Washington, D.C. office. “I work a lot, but I’m not a workaholic. I want to get out at the end of the day.”  

Since 2021, Avery has been a partner at executive search firm Isaacson, Miller, where she uses what can be a lengthy, painstaking process to identify candidates for leadership in the non-profit sector. The results, she said, feel magical when she recommends individuals who go on to shape culture, strengthen education, and propel mission-driven organizations.  

Avery helped hire leaders at Howard University, Grantmakers for Education, The Miami Foundation, along with the Saratoga Performing Arts Center and WAMC Northeast Public Radio.  

Recently, she took part in an especially meaningful search: recommending Michael G. Turner as Albany Academy’s next head of school. Turner will succeed Christopher Lauricella P'20, '22 to lead a new, fully co-educational institution. 
 
“I think he will be an excellent leader who will connect with Academy at all levels,” said Avery, who worked closely with Academy’s search committee. “He is going to have quite a presence.” 

In spite of a packed calendar, Avery didn’t sound rushed. She has always carved out time for organizations she cares about, including Wolf Trap in Vienna, VA and ACT for Alexandria, a foundation in her Virginia city where she served on the board and as vice chair.

Avery has remained especially close to Albany Academy for Girls, which named her 2023 Distinguished Alumna. A former honorary trustee, she is on the Albany Academy Board of Visitors – and has delivered the Girls Academy commencement address twice. True to form, she focused the 2017 address on the importance of her daughter and son – now in their twenties – and of enjoying who you are and what you do.

“Most of the time when we think of people who lead, laughter and humor are not factors of their leadership style,” she told the graduating class. “Why is this? Is leadership only serious business? Can’t one lead and be funny?… As a leader, by taking yourself too seriously you run into the danger of alienating those you are trying to move forward.”

Raised in Loudonville, Avery came to Albany Academy for Girls in kindergarten. One brother, Keith ’74 is also an Academy “lifer,” and the other, Kevin ’80, started in sixth grade. 

Today, her most treasured friends are from the school. The five of them, in fact, visit one another and take part in a virtual book group (now reading Kiran Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny”). Not long ago, they met in Asheville to celebrate 60th birthdays – wearing matching socks marking the occasion.   

“It’s unique and wonderful to have close friends whom you have known for 50-plus years,” she said. 

While appreciating the single-sex education, she would have attended Academy regardless. By high school, she said, most classes were co-ed. 

What stood out were small classes and specialized instruction. Then, as now, Academy helps children from middle-class families like hers advance. Like Kevin and Keith, she went on to Harvard, where she earned an undergraduate degree in psychology and social relations and a master’s in education. 

“Academy really prepared me for Harvard,” she said, noting five members of her class attended the Ivy League school. 

Likening her career journey to that of a lucky tumbleweed, and perhaps being modest, Avery says she lets opportunities find her. She began working at Harvard in graduate school and stayed more than a decade, advancing in admissions and becoming an assistant dean. 

She left Boston when her husband, health economist Dr. Richard H. Chapman, got a job in the D.C. area. Through a Harvard contact, she interviewed to become director of foundation relations at the Smithsonian Institution, overseeing fundraising for 19 museums, nine research centers and the National Zoo. She helped secure a $40 million Gates Foundation grant for a cross-institutional research initiative. 

Avery next served as senior director of the PBS Foundation, where she was able to allocate, as well as raise, funding. She secured support for digital initiatives, PBS KIDS, and equitable educational outreach. 

If she didn’t lay out a blueprint for her career, Avery is clear that Albany Academy for Girls helped her feel she could do whatever she set her heart to do. She credits her parents, Estelle and Dorman Avery, with making the sacrifices needed to send their three children to Academy.

Avery still remembers the independence she experienced from the start. To get to school she took two buses. Returning from her first day of kindergarten, she was switching to the second bus, when she saw her father.  

“I said, ‘Yay, Duddy! You are here to drive me home?’” she recalled (Avery affectionately called her father "Duddy"). “He said, ‘I’m just here to make sure you get on the right bus.’ Five-year-old me was bummed and a little nervous, but suddenly, I was doing things I didn’t know I could do, and that felt really good.”