Betty Freeman

Who was Betty Freeman?

Betty Wishnick-Freeman was an American philanthropist and photographer.

Freeman was born in Chicago, Illinois. At the age of three she moved with her parents and two brothers to Brooklyn, later moving to New Rochelle, New York and attending New Rochelle High School. Her father was a chemical engineer who had graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and her mother was a mathematics teacher and graduate of the University of Wisconsin. Betty Freeman was a graduate of Wellesley College, where she majored in English literature with a minor in music. She had originally trained to be a concert pianist, practicing six to eight hours per day for twenty years, but eventually, by the mid-1960s, gave up this dream to pursue concert managing. Following her graduation she married and had four children, then later divorced and married the Italian sculptor and painter Franco Assetto, with whom she lived half of each year in Turin.

As of 2003, Freeman had made 432 grants and commissions to 81 composers, often early in their careers.