Alison Goldwater Ross

Founder and Executive Director

Alison Goldwater Ross is  Executive Director, President and founder of the Barry & Peggy Goldwater Foundation. She is among the third generation of family members to descend from her maternal grandparents, Senator and Mrs., Barry and Peggy Goldwater. Alison began her career in New York City as an assistant designer at Kleinberg Sherrill, a luxury accessories design firm where she specialized in product placement. Later, Alison co-founded the Goldwater Group, a public relations firm representing high profile clients, including the Rainforest Alliance, for which she co-produced benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden with headliners that included The Grateful Dead.  Her work also included segment producing for on-air segments of the ABC series, “LIVE!” with Regis and Kathie Lee.” After returning to her home state of Arizona, she worked with the Scottsdale Convention & Visitors Bureau (now Experience Scottsdale), traveling internationally to promote the city of Scottsdale as an attractive travel destination and enhancing its public image as a dynamic place to live and work. In Arizona, Alison also served as the first exclusive marketing events director and public relations executive for Barrett-Jackson Classic Car Auction. She pioneered the sponsorship, marketing and media outreach that catapulted Barrett-Jackson into an international automotive and lifestyle event.  

In 2006, Alison began showcasing a small collection of her grandfather’s photographs in various museums in the southeastern U.S., including the LaGrange Art Museum, Booth Western Art Museum (in a showcase with Ansel Adams), and Huntsville Museum of Art. Recognizing that her grandfather’s legacy of negatives, slides and motion picture film faced inevitable risk of deterioration, Alison established the Foundation to digitize, restore, curate, exhibit,  and create educational platforms for the photographic negatives, slides and motion pictures of her grandfather and, ultimately, other similar 19th and 20th-century photographic legacies. Alison is the co-author of the book, Photographs by Barry M. Goldwater: The Arizona Highways Collection.