|
Management and Boards
Jonathan C. Abbott
President and CEO
As head of the WGBH Educational Foundation, Jon Abbott leads a staff of 900. He presides over WGBH's public television services (WGBH 2 and 44; cable channels WGBH World, WGBH Create, 'GBH Kids, WGBH High Definition, WGBH On Demand, Boston Kids & Family TV; and Springfield channel WGBY 57, with its cable services); its public radio operations (WGBH 89.7 in Boston, heard on Nantucket on WNCK 89.5, and WGBH's Cape and Islands NPR station WCAI 90.1, 91.1, and 94.3); and its wide range of national production ventures, educational activities, and media access initiatives.
Abbott became President in October 2007, having served as WGBH's Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer (2004-2007) and Vice President of Television Stations and General Manager (1998-2004). He came to WGBH from PBS, where he was Senior Vice President for Development and Corporate Relations from 1992 to 1998. Prior to that, he spent five years in management with San Francisco public station KQED. He got his start in broadcasting in 1981 at Columbia University station WKCR-FM.
Abbott is a board member of distributor American Public Television (APT) as well as public television's Major Market Group. He is a Trustee of the Boston Children's Museum and Arts Boston, and a board member of Project Healthy Children. He also is an Advisory Council Member for Harvard University's Master of Liberal Arts in Management Program.
David Bernstein
WGBH Vice President and General Manager for WGBH Enterprises
David Bernstein directs WGBH's business activities, which include distribution of WGBH programs to the home video, foreign, and commercial markets; negotiation of partnerships with commercial and foreign co-producers; publishing; and licensing. Prior to joining WGBH in 1992, Bernstein held positions as a senior consultant for Devonshire Consulting; Assistant Secretary of Administration and Finance and director of the Office of Management Information Systems for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; and Associate Commissioner of the Massachusetts Welfare Department.
Margaret Drain
Vice President for National Programming
Margaret Drain is WGBH's vice president for National Programming, with responsibility for overseeing WGBH's many celebrated series seen nationally on PBS, including Frontline, Nova, Antiques Roadshow, Masterpiece Theatre and American Experience. Fully one-third of PBS's prime-time lineup comes from WGBH, including PBS's most-watched program, Antiques Roadshow (more than 10 million viewers/week).
Named Vice President for National Programming in June 2003, Drain is responsible for developing new programs (Nova ScienceNow, Simply Ming, etc.) and forging new co-production relationships (e.g., for Evolution and Rx for Survival--A Global Health Challenge). She created WGBH Lifestyle Productions to develop new programs about cooking, gardening, health, music and performance, and other subjects related to contemporary living. Under Drain's leadership, WGBH has won multiple News and Documentary Emmys, duPont-Columbia Awards, and George Foster Peabody Awards for its national programming.
Drain began her career at WGBH with American Experience, having served as senior producer from 1987, and as executive producer beginning in 1997.
Jeanne M. Hopkins
Vice President, Communications and Government Relations
Jeanne Hopkins oversees media, community, and government relations for WGBH along with employee communications and the editorial group that creates WGBH's program guide, annual report, and other key publications.
Hopkins joined WGBH in 1989 as Director of Media Relations. In 1991 she helped create and oversee WGBH's government relations initiatives, serving as the liaison between WGBH and the federal legislature.
Prior to joining WGBH, Hopkins spent 10 years in University Relations at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and was press secretary to a former US Congressman.
Susan L. Kantrowitz
WGBH Vice President and General Counsel
Sue Kantrowitz is responsible for all legal matters affecting the WGBH Educational Foundation, including all aspects of the production contracting process and the negotiation and administration of national collective bargaining agreements with actors, writers and musicians. She also oversees the WGBH Media Library and Archives.
Kantrowitz joined WGBH's legal department in 1981, becoming Director of Legal Affairs in 1984. She was named the station's first General Counsel in 1986. Kantrowitz came to WGBH from the public relations firm Bozell & Jacobs, where she was an account executive. Prior to that she was an associate producer at California station KOCE-TV.
Kantrowitz holds both a bachelor's degree and a JD. She is a member of the American Bar Association, the Massachusetts Bar Association and the Boston Bar Association.
Winifred Lenihan
WGBH Vice President for Development
A nationally respected development professional, Win Lenihan leads WGBH's major philanthropic fundraising, planned and high-level annual giving, and foundation development efforts as well as its board development activities. Lenihan has played a strong hand in three WGBH capital campaigns, directing the last two, which set new marks for the organization. She began her development career in 1983 in WGBH's membership office.
Lance W. Ozier
WGBH Vice President for Planning and Policy
Lance Ozier works with WGBH's President and Vice Presidents to advance the organization's strategic planning and works with PBS to address those policies and operations that impact WGBH's success as public television's leading producer of prime-time television and Web content.
Ozier joined WGBH in 1990 as Director of National Underwriting, responsible for raising funds for national television and radio projects from national corporate and foundation sources. He was promoted to Vice President in 1998. Before joining WGBH, he was for six years the Vice President for Program Business Affairs at PBS's national headquarters. He began his public television career with the University of North Carolina television network in 1973. He served as Business Manager for WGBY 57 in Springfield, MA (a division of WGBH) in 1977-78 and joined PBS in 1978, where he became Vice President in 1984.
Jamie Parker
Vice President, Marketing and Communications
Jamie Parker oversees the consolidated division that encompasses WGBH's corporate communications, promotion and marketing, branding and visual communications, and audience research. She joined WGBH in 2006 from Arnold Worldwide, where she was Senior Vice President of Brand Communications, developing differentiated messaging and exploring new communications platforms based on the agency's creative campaigns. Prior to Arnold, Parker was with Weber Shandwick Worldwide for 10 years, five as President of Weber Shandwick Cambridge and The Technology Practice.
Parker began her career at The Computer Museum, Boston, as Director of Exhibitions and Archives. She spent 12 years in communications at Digital Equipment Corporation before moving to the agency world.
Parker's commitment to non-profit work has led her to serve as a consultant to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Museum of Science, the University of Massachusetts Boston, Hamilton College, and the Cam Neely Foundation for Cancer Care. She is a member of the board of overseers of the Bank of America Celebrity Series.
Russell J. Peotter
WGBH Vice President and General Manager for WGBY Springfield
Rus Peotter is responsible for the management of WGBY Springfield, the WGBH-affiliated public television station serving western Massachusetts, northern Connecticut and southern Vermont. He oversees all station functions including programming, production, development, engineering, and administration.
Peotter came to WGBY in 2001 from Maine Public Broadcasting, where he was in charge of the station's fundraising, promotion, outreach, and audience service efforts since 1992. He has served on numerous PBS national committees, helping senior PBS management develop policies and services in support of stations across the country.
Christopher Pullman
Vice President for Branding and Visual Communications
Chris Pullman has headed branding and visual communications at WGBH since 1973, overseeing the personality of WGBH as expressed through on-air titles, credits, animation, and promotion; promotional, marketing, and advertising materials; interactive media; and classroom teaching tools. Under his leadership, WGBH was awarded the 1986 Design Leadership Award from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), recognizing WGBH's contribution to "the advancement of design by application of the highest standards, as a matter of policy, to all its visual communications."
Prior to joining WGBH, Pullman operated a freelance design practice in New Haven and served as a design consultant in the office of George Nelson in New York.
Pullman has published numerous articles on design for television. He has taught at Yale University since 1966 and has lectured widely to schools and professional organizations. In 1993 he was named to the first list of the I.D. Forty, the 40 most influential designers, published by International Design magazine. In 2002, he was the recipient of the coveted American Institute of Graphic Arts Medal, which recognizes distinguished lifetime achievements in the field of graphic design and visual communication.
Marita Rivero
Vice President and General Manager for Radio and Television
Marita Rivero oversees the programming, marketing, and administration of WGBH's TV and radio stations and Web site. On the radio side, this includes WGBH 89.7 in Boston (heard on Nantucket on WNCK 89.5) and Cape and Islands NPR stations WCAI 90.1, WNAN 91.1, and WZAI 94.3. WGBH's television services include WGBH 2 and 44 and cable channels WGBH World, WGBH Create, 'GBH Kids, WGBH High Definition, WGBH On Demand, and Boston Kids & Family TV. Rivero also oversees WGBH's national radio production activity and local television production unit, Boston Media Productions.
Rivero was named manager of WGBH Radio in 1988, later adding wgbh.org and then television station management to her portfolio. Award-winning radio productions developed under her leadership include the daily global news program The World, the Marketplace Health Desk, Sound & Spirit, and the international music service Art of the States. She also served as Executive-in-Charge of WGBH's Peabody Award-winning multimedia project Africans in America. Rivero has developed wgbh.org's WGBH Forum Network; WGBH's podcasting efforts and new satellite radio services; and a substantial community partnership program with media, arts, and education partners.
Rivero began her broadcast career at WGBH in 1970 as a producer of public affairs television, including Say Brother (now Basic Black), one of the nation's oldest weekly series by, for, and about African Americans. She served as general manager of WPFW, Washington, DC's Pacifica radio station, from 1981 to 1988. Rivero has been honored with several awards for her achievements, among them, a 2007 Pinnacle Award from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, for Achievement in Arts & Education; the first Image Award for Vision and Excellence from Women in Film and Video/New England; and induction into the YWCA's Academy of Women Achievers.
Brigid Sullivan
Vice President for Children's, Educational, and Interactive Programming, Media Access
Brigid Sullivan is WGBH's vice president for Children's, Educational, and Interactive Programming, and Media Access. Sullivan came to WGBH from Harvard Business School in 1978 and in 1980 created the division that today is WGBH's single largest growth area.
Sullivan is responsible for the creation of WGBH's award-winning children's television series broadcast nationally on PBS (Arthur, Postcards from Buster, Between the Lions, Curious George, Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman, and formerly, Zoom) and on commercial TV (Peep and the Big Wide World, Time Warp Trio). In addition, she oversees departments that produce some of the most popular telecourses of all time (French in Action, Destinos, Misunderstood Minds) as well as online professional training courses for teachers K-12 and Teachers' Domain, a Web-based multimedia library tied to national and state curriculum standards. She launched WGBH's Interactive department, whose Web sites generates a quarter of the traffic to pbs.org, one of the most-visited dot-org sites in the world. She dramatically expanded WGBH's commitment to ensuring that the 36 million Americans with hearing or vision impairments have access to popular media (captioning, Descriptive Video Service®, the movie theater MoPix system), and broke new ground with Nova Giant-Screen Films (Special Effects, Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure, et al.)
Under Sullivan's leadership, WGBH has won every major award for children's television, educational programming, interactive content, and media access.
Suzanne Zellner
Vice President for Corporate Development
Suzanne Zellner oversees WGBH's national and regional corporate development activities, supervising the staff that secures sponsors for WGBH and handles marketing, client services, and sponsor research.
Zellner joined WGBH in 2003 to direct the Sponsorship Group for Public Television (SGPTV), which secures national corporate sponsors for signature PBS programs, including WGBH's own productions (which comprise fully one-third of public television's prime-time lineup). She was promoted two years later to supervise a newly consolidated department that unifies WGBH's national sales, marketing, client services, and sponsor research operations with the regional sponsorship sales team for WGBH's TV and radio broadcasts, Web site, and events.
Zellner came to WGBH with more than 20 years of sales, account management, and product management at Ziff Communications and CMP Media. She also has CEO and COO experience at three Internet start-up companies. She is the founding executive director of MassWIT (Women, Insights, Technology), a professional women's networking organization.
|
