In July 2024, Interim President and Director Porter Durham was appointed by the board of trustees to lead the National Humanities Center while a national search is being conducted for a successor to the Center’s former president and director, Robert D. Newman. Durham has been a member of the Center’s board of trustees since 2015 and served as board chair before taking on his current role.
A lawyer by training, Porter Durham has spent 40 years as an advisor and legal counsel, most recently as the managing partner of Global Endowment Management (GEM), an institutional money management firm he co-founded in 2007. Prior to his work at GEM, he served as staff counsel and director of the Education Division of The Duke Endowment, a foundation established by industrialist James B. Duke, to support his philanthropic interests in higher education, rural churches, healthcare, and childcare. While in private practice, he was a partner and served as chair of the Securities Department of Baker Donelson law firm.
Porter’s service in the nonprofit arena is extensive and multi-faceted and includes organizations focused on the arts and humanities, education, and services for those in need. In addition to his decade of work in support of the National Humanities Center, he has been a trustee of St. Andrew’s School in Delaware, is the immediate past chair of the Duke Law School Board of Visitors, and has served on the boards of the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy, The Oxford American Literary Project, Trinity Episcopal School, and Johnson C. Smith University.
In the business sector, he has served in special advising and board engagements for investment funds, farming and agricultural concerns, energy companies, hospitals, and housing funds. He has also provided counsel for family businesses in generational transition, for the creation of new foundations and wealth transition structures for wealthy families, and for businesses facing leadership or other crises in many different contexts.
Porter graduated cum laude from Duke University and the Duke University School of Law.