Ann B. Friedman

Planet Word, which opened in October 2020 at a final cost of $60 million, will pay the city $10 a year on a 99-year lease.

In 2017, Washington D.C. mayor Muriel E. Bowser selected Friedman and her team to restore the historic Franklin School building and repurpose the building into a new museum, Planet Word. The project was estimated to cost $50 million and Friedman committed $20 million of her own to the project.

In 1988, Friedman, who with her family, moved to the Washington D. C. area, started teaching privately in “a course she devised on world cultures and geography.” According to one source, Friedman tutored illiterate adults in reading as well as English as a second language. Later she taught first and second graders. Friedman formerly taught reading at Bethesda, Maryland's Burning Tree Elementary School.

She graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Des Moines in 1973. She graduated in 1975 from Stanford University with majors in economics and history. While there, she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. Friedman earned a masters degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1976. Friedman later earned a masters in teaching from American University in 1998.

Ann B. Friedman (born 1954) is a former teacher and founder of Planet Word, a museum devoted to language arts that opened in Washington, D.C. in October 2020.

Ann Louise Bucksbaum was born in Marshalltown, Iowa on April 13, 1954. He parents were real estate developer Matthew Bucksbaum and Carolyn "Kay" Swartz. Matthew Bucksbaum co-founded the shopping mall giant General Growth Properties. The couple had two children, Ann and John Bucksbaum.