ART:
From a very young age, Gail always made time to pursue art, and has a particularly deep respect for craft-making. As an art/art history student in her 20s, she specialized in ceramics, a passion she renewed in 2018, when she returned to throwing pottery. She has sold her work through retail stores in on the East and West Coasts, including the gift shop of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition, she is a prolific knitter — always for love, never for money. Gail’s work has been influenced by her interest in anthropology and extensive travels to global capitals as well as places further off the beaten path including Bangladesh, Laos, Togo, Angola and Sri Lanka.
HEART:
Gail currently serves on the board of Hello Future, a non-profit dedicated to helping adolescent refugees become entrepreneurs and civic leaders through on-site services and a mobile phone-based digital financial and media literacy program. She also serves on the advisory council of Hello Neighbor, a non-profit committed to supporting recently resettled refugee and immigrant families in the U.S. She formerly served a 6-year term as a member of the Board of the Ms. Foundation for Women, the oldest women’s fund in the U.S., dedicated to helping grass roots organizations serve the economic, health and safety needs of women and their communities. She has also been a Trustee of Tomorrow Trust, a non-profit organization that educates AIDS orphans and other vulnerable children in South Africa.
While professionally a self-confessed media junkie, Gail has always been a passionate supporter in the communities where she lives and works. Her diverse volunteering service has ranged from teaching pottery classes for the blind, staffing a hotline for domestic violence survivors, teaching English to Russian and Arabic-speaking immigrants and serving as a hospice volunteer.
GLOBALLY SMART:
Gail's intellectual curiosity, combined with lessons learned on her travels, have also informed her professional pursuits. She led teams at American Express’s European and Asian headquarters from London and Singapore, where she headed internal and external communications for all its businesses. Her responsibilities ranged from introducing celebrity spokespeople and sponsorships — like the first product launch for (Red) in Davos with Bono — to a research report on the future of luxury: 21st Centurion Living. This pioneering study tapped celebrity tastemakers from across Europe to predict trends that would shape the industry and garnered $4 million in editorial value.
Gail is equally agile at playing offense and defense. She was a spokesperson on consumer affairs issues like consumer debt, privacy and financial responsibility, as well as a Department of Justice antitrust case against Visa and MasterCard, which resulted in a $3.8 billion settlement for American Express — the largest in corporate history at that time. She took a mid-career break from American Express, and for several years served as a consultant for a broader range of clients including Estée Lauder, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Nasdaq Stock Exchange.
Prior to joining American Express, Gail was a Vice President of Public Relations at Ogilvy & Mather in New York. She began her career heading publicity and promotion for George Braziller, an independent book publisher who specialized in art books and foreign fiction.
She earned a dual B.S./B.A. degree in art history and communications from the S.I Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.
READING. LISTENING. WATCHING. Now.
Reading
Matrix by Lauren Groff
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
The Making of America’s Fury by Evan Osnos
Crying in H Mart Mart by Michelle Zauner
Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton
The Economist: How Luther Went Viral
Listening
Fresh Air
Design Matters
On the Media
The Ezra Klein Show
Invisibilia
Sex, Death & Money
Maintenance Phase
The Last Archive
Watching
The Americans
CODA
I May Destroy You
Killing Eve
What the Constitution Means to Me