The following bio comes courtesy of The Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University:

Kitty Dukakis’ concerns for women’s rights, human rights, the arts, the environment, her community and family are mirrored in the numerous activities and organizations that have characterized both her public and private life.

Appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, she then became a founding member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and served as a member of its Committee on Conscience.

Ms. Dukakis has worked extensively on issues related to the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and contemporary human rights issues. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Refugee Policy Group and Refugees International. In 1985, she participated in a fact-finding tour of refugee camps in Thailand, and established the Refugees International/Cambodian Crisis Fund to bring about humanitarian changes in the processing of Southeast Asians with families in the United States. She also organized a Task Force on Cambodian Children. In 1981 Ms. Dukakis organized a mission to Thailand where she worked for the release of 250 unaccompanied orphaned Cambodian minors, most of whom settled in Massachusetts.

From 1985 to 1989 she was the Director of the Program on Public Space Partnerships, a joint program between the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. The program developed demonstration projects and research models for the design, management, and funding of public spaces. Ms. Dukakis was greatly influenced by her parents’ appreciation of the arts. Her late father, Harry Ellis Dickson, was a first violinist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 49 years, associate conductor of the Boston Pops, director of the Youth Concerts at Symphony Hall and conductor emeritus of the Boston Classical Orchestra. Ms. Dukakis taught modern dance for many years at the Dittmer School of Dance in State College in Pennsylvania, Lesley College and the Brookline Arts Center.

Ms. Dukakis served on the advisory board of Mapendo International, a humanitarian organization that rescues and protects at risk and forgotten refugees in Africa. She also served on the board of the New England Center for Children, a school for autistic children in Southborough, MA and is the namesake of the Kitty Dukakis Treatment Center for Women, which is part of the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital. She is also the author of two books: Now You Know, the story of her battle with addiction and depression and Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy, co-authored with Larry Tye, which describes how ECT proved to be the one treatment that dealt effectively with her reoccurring cycles of depression.

Ms. Dukakis attended Pennsylvania State University and received a B.A. in Education from Lesley College. She also received an M.S. in Broadcast and Film, Boston University School of Communications, and a Master’s of Social Work from the Boston University School of Social Work.

Mike and Kitty Dukakis have three children: John, Andrea, and Kara, and are also proud grandparents