Christy Carpenter, EVP and COO, The Paley Center for Media
Christy Carpenter was named executive vice president and chief operating officer of The Paley Center for Media (formerly The Museum of Television & Radio) in January 2006. She joined the organization in June 2003 as a vice president and executive director of the Media Council and the International Council, which bring together top executives and leading thinkers in the global media industry to discuss a wide range of critical issues in media.
Christy Carpenter has some thirty years of experience in media, marketing, and nonprofit management. A lawyer by training, she was an early pioneer in interactive services during the 1980s, initially participating in Warner Cable's interactive QUBE service; subsequently with Prodigy Interactive Services (a venture of IBM, Sears, and CBS) as the marketing director for the first PC-based online service designed for the mass market; and later with Telaction, an electronic home-shopping service developed by JCPenney. Carpenter also served as vice president and group director for the international public relations firm Hill & Knowlton in New York, where she represented a range of major consumer product and new media companies.
From 1990 to 1995, Ms. Carpenter held two senior-level management positions with nonprofit trade associations in San Francisco. As senior executive for public and professional services for the State Bar of California, she managed a variety of programs, including communications and consumer education for the nation's largest state bar association, overseeing a staff of seventy. Subsequently, she was named executive vice president and chief operating officer for the Wine Institute, where she directed the headquarters staff and total organizational budget for the association's four hundred winery members, representing 90 percent of U.S. wine production.
In 1998, President Clinton appointed her to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where she served as vice chair for two years. Carpenter went on to run her own consulting practice and spent several years in the trenches as a dot-com entrepreneur and new media executive. In 2002, she was elected to the board of KCET, the largest public television station in Southern California.
Carpenter, who has worked for all three branches of the federal government, clerked for former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark early in her career when he served as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge. She received her BA from Brown University and her JD from the American University Law School. She also completed a year of study at the London School of Economics during her junior year of college.