Katherine "Kitty" Dukakis 1936-2025

The Dukakis Center mourns the passing of Kitty Dukakis, former First Lady of Massachusetts, who passed away in Brookline, MA, on Friday, March 21, 2025. She was 88.

Ms Dukakis visited Thessaloniki and ACT on three occasions with her husband, former Massachusetts Governor and 1988 Democratic Nominee for President of the United States Michael S. Dukakis. While on campus she participated in several activities with ACT students, and conducted a seminar-style discussion on her experience with electroconvulsive therapy. During her time interacting with the ACT community she came across as a genuinely passionate and compelling personality.

Says David Wisner, Executive Director of the Dukakis Center at ACT, who hosted the Dukakis’ at his home in Panorama and visited them whenever he travelled to the United States, “Kitty Dukakis came across as thoroughly courageous and dignified. She was well aware of her role as someone in the public eye. We were incredibly fortunate to have hosted her at ACT. Looking back, the decision by the Anatolia College Board of Trustees to name our Center after both Michael and Kitty Dukakis was enlightened and inspiring.”

Ms Dukakis served and was engaged in many capacities, among which in the context of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust and then of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. In her own words, she said her role was to help “recognize the suffering of other people as we look at the Holocaust so that we will speak out against inhumanity.”

May her memory be a blessing.