Jessica Z. Brown
Chair, Marketing Committee

Jessica Z. Brown, media literacy proponent and educator, is an award-winning communications professional with more than 30 years experience, including television and feature news, video production, corporate marketing communications, customer service management and education consulting. She is a founder of Gateway Media Literacy Partnerships, a growing bi-state (Mo. and Il.) effort, based in St. Louis, to bring public-, private-, volunteer- and independent-sector individuals and organizations together, under one umbrella, to create and sustain a media literate community, and speaks to professional and parent groups on the importance of on-going media literacy education as a vehicle toward economic development and healthy communities. She is now a lecturer at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and an adjunct professor at Webster University following an enriching, close-to-17-year management career at SBC,Inc.

Brown, a national finalist in Cable in the Classroom's Leaders in Learning Awards, serves on the "It's the Soul That Sees Foundation" board and will begin her fifth year as a United Way campaign representative; a Ladue School District volunteer, she serves on its Public Relations Committee. Brown is also a 2003 graduate of the Pew Partnership for Civic Change/St. Louis LeadershipPlenty and a past participant in the FOCUS/St. Louis-Leadership program as well as both a past president of the St. Louis chapter of Women In Communications, Inc., and a past vice-president of the St. Louis chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. For nine years, Brown served on the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences' mid-west chapter board and headed its Creating Critical Viewers television literacy project.

Brown, who recently became certified as a Newspapers in Education teacher, received her Masters Degree in Communications, specializing in interactive media and media literacy, from Webster University, St. Louis, in 1999; and her Bachelor of Arts Degree, specializing in Journalism and Marketing, from Northeastern University, Boston, MA, in 1973. Brown is fluent in French.