Julie Deborah Brown built something that has outlasted her marriage to Ken Burns by almost a decade. This year, his documentary The American Revolution has made this one of the most visible years of his long career.
Julie Deborah Brown opened her first office in a storefront in East Harlem in the autumn of 1998. It measured about 550 square feet, and she was the only person working there. There is no record of anyone writing about her for the next five years. The charity she started in that space, Room to Grow, still runs today out of centres in New York, Boston and Chicago. She still sits on its board, and she has never taken a salary for any of it.
Two other women share her name, and it is easy to end up reading about the wrong one. Julie K. Brown is the Miami Herald reporter behind the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, and Downtown Julie Brown is a former MTV presenter. Neither is related to her.
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Fast facts
- Born around 1965, so about 60 today
- Married Ken Burns in 2003, divorced around 2017
- Two daughters with Burns, Olivia and Willa, now in their early twenties and mid teens
- Founded Room to Grow in 1998 and has never taken a salary for it
From an auction house to a storefront in East Harlem
Before any of this, Brown worked in the Old Masters department at Christie’s, the auction house founded in London. Room to Grow’s own staff page lists her as Julie Burns, the name she has used professionally since marrying. She has a bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of Michigan, and a master’s in social work from New York University, which she completed in the mid 1990s.
Her first job after that was as a psychotherapist working with school-age children at the Karen Horney Clinic in New York. Speaking on WNYC’s All Of It in 2023, alongside longtime Room to Grow supporter Uma Thurman, Brown said much of what she was seeing in older children “could in many ways be prevented” with support that started much earlier, from the beginning of a baby’s life.
She opened Room to Grow that autumn, taking on around 100 families referred by local prenatal clinics. Families visited every few months, from before the baby was born until the child turned three, meeting with a social worker each time and leaving with the basic items a new baby needs. Her name did not appear in print until her wedding, five years later.
A marriage that lasted fourteen years, and a divorce that got one sentence
Brown married Ken Burns on 18 October 2003, at his home in Walpole, New Hampshire. Dayton Duncan, a longtime writing collaborator of Burns and a licensed justice of the peace, officiated. It was Burns’s second marriage; his first, to filmmaker Amy Stechler, had ended in 1993. The couple went on to have two daughters together.
The wedding announcement in the New York Times described her as the daughter of Richard Brown, once a senior investment executive at Smith Barney in New York, and Leslie Mundjer, and named her stepmother, Ellen Brown.
Once she married, the photographs started. There is a Getty Images picture of her and Burns at the 2007 Cannes premiere of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. There are more from Room to Grow galas most years after that, and in 2014 the couple were guests at an informal dinner at the White House with the Obamas. None of that kind of coverage exists for the years before the wedding, when she was building the thing she is known for today.
The marriage ended around 2017. The fullest account of it in print comes from a New Yorker profile of Burns published that September, in which writer Ian Parker mentioned, almost in passing, that Burns had recently divorced for the second time. Brown has never spoken publicly about the split herself.
Where Room to Grow stands today
Room to Grow has grown well beyond where it started. It expanded into Boston in 2004, into Chicago in 2025, and a new site in Boston is due to open later in 2026. The charity’s most recently filed federal tax return, covering 2024, put its revenue at just over 4.5 million dollars.
Uma Thurman was Brown’s neighbour in 1998, pregnant at the time with her daughter Maya Hawke, and has served on the charity’s board for more than a decade. Both women remain involved with Room to Grow today.
Brown’s own title has changed over the years, from executive director in the early days to board president and now board chair.
There is not much else on the public record about her, and she gives interviews rarely. What the charity’s own tax filings show clearly, across twelve years of federal returns, is that her compensation line reads zero on every single one.
