Founder/donor Walter H. Annenberg was born in 1908, and enjoyed a distinguished career as a publisher, broadcaster, diplomat and philanthropist. He graduated from The Peddie School, Hightstown, New Jersey, attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and entered the family publishing business in Philadelphia, where he became President of Triangle Publications in 1940 and, subsequently, Chairman of the Board. Triangle included TV Guide and Seventeen Magazine, among other publications, as well as radio and TV stations nation-wide. Mr. Annenberg also pioneered educational programming via television, for which he was awarded the Alfred I. DuPont Award, the Marshall Field Award, and the Ralph Lowell Medal for his "outstanding contribution to public television."

He founded The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958 and The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in 1971. In 1983, the Annenberg Schools established the Washington Program in Communications Policy Studies in response to growing awareness that difficult government and industry problems were emerging in the rapidly changing telecommunications field.

He served as Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Great Britain, from 1968 to 1974. By the late 1980's, having sold all of his publishing enterprises, Mr. Annenberg devoted his attention to philanthropy and public service. He was a founder-trustee of the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowships and Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, California, a Trustee of the Winston Churchill Traveling Fellowships, and an Emeritus Trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the University of Pennsylvania, and The Peddie School. He was the recipient of many honors and awards, including the National Medal of Arts awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Medal of Freedom awarded by President Reagan. Ambassador Annenberg passed away, October 1, 2002.