For more than two decades, I’ve built the content operations, teams, and institutional partnerships that let mission-driven brands tell stories that matter. Most recently I led content and editorial strategy at the National Geographic Society, where I directed storytelling across the Society’s owned channels and managed the content collaboration with The Walt Disney Company. Before that, executive roles at Travel Channel and Discovery. I work at the intersection of content, partnership, and measurable impact, and I’m currently open to senior roles and select advisory engagements.
When I took strategic ownership of Earth Month, it was meaningful inside the Society but not yet an enterprise moment. I saw a bigger opportunity: anchor the campaign to National Geographic’s documentary franchise, align every department behind a single narrative, and coordinate with Disney’s global distribution to amplify it.
Each year we built the campaign around a new release, coordinating editorial, paid and earned media, social, and donor engagement. I developed the cross-network PSA program from scratch. I owned the strategy, managed the partnerships, and presented results to the Board.
The campaign became a repeatable engine with its own playbook, measurement framework, and audience-specific messaging.
For six years I served as the Society’s primary content and editorial liaison to The Walt Disney Company, the relationship through which National Geographic’s magazine, television, and media businesses operate. Prior to that, I managed the joint venture relationship with 20th Century Fox. The challenges were similar but of different scales, primarily aligning two very different institutional cultures: a mission-driven nonprofit and a global entertainment company, so that Disney’s distribution amplified the Society’s mission rather than diluting it.
I built relationships at the working and executive levels and created content frameworks that gave Disney clear, compelling hooks to activate, so their commercial interest and the Society’s mission pointed in the same direction.
The relationship was stronger when I left than when I arrived.
Ahead of the November 2024 release of Disney’s Moana 2, I developed a partnership between Walt Disney Animation, the Society’s Pristine Seas initiative, and the Polynesian Voyaging Society to turn the film’s ocean-voyaging story into a real conservation moment. The Answer the Call campaign connected the film’s themes to Pristine Seas’ marine protection work and to the revival of traditional Pacific wayfinding, the real science behind Moana’s journey.
The collaboration produced an original featurette and a dedicated content hub, channeling the energy of a global film release toward protecting the ocean rather than simply promoting a movie. It is the clearest example of what the Disney relationship was built to do: align commercial scale with mission so that both win.
The Rolex National Geographic Expedition was the largest multidisciplinary partnership in the Society’s history: three organizations (NGS, Rolex, and Disney), multiple years, and global scope. I led content and editorial strategy for the Amazon Expeditions end to end, from the Earth Day announcement through the magazine issue and the digital experience.
I managed the storytelling arc, the editorial product, the immersive digital experience (Into the Amazon), and the coordination across all three partners.
Not all impact is a campaign. Some of it is the infrastructure that everything else runs on. I led the redesign and relaunch of natgeo.org, and I designed and launched the Society’s first global digital asset management system.
The DAM required building the business case and securing buy-in across a nonprofit with strong departmental silos, then standing up infrastructure that scaled with the brand. It’s the kind of foundational work that makes a content operation function for years after launch, and it reflects the same systems instinct I first developed managing a 500+ hour annual production pipeline at Discovery.
Before the mission world, I was a programming executive. At Travel Channel I shaped programming strategy for a global lifestyle brand and managed complex talent partnerships with household names including Queen Latifah, Terry Crews, and Jon Cryer, navigating agency dynamics and aligning personal brand with network identity.
We took a data-led approach to repositioning the network’s creative direction toward a broader lifestyle audience, producing consistent year-over-year ratings growth and a Daytime Emmy nomination. The same soft-power skills, reading the room and aligning very different stakeholders, are exactly what I later brought to Explorers and C-suite partners.