VESTA Leadership Team

Lise serves as the Chief Marketing Officer for VESTA. Lise started her career on Wall Street in investor relations and then did a stint at NYC ad agency Donovan & Green on the American Express Platinum account before moving on to work in marketing for Ralph Lauren. Lise was then offered a job on a feature film and jumped careers, splitting her time between NYC and Los Angeles and working for clients such as MTV (on Peabody and Emmy Award-winning projects), IBM, ABC TV, and NHK Japan. She developed a specialty in media for social impact, with a focus on environmental affairs. Her next move was to work in Indian Country and she was based in South Dakota and Colorado for seventeen years where she co-founded Native Voice Media. This social impact venture published and produced The Native Voice newspaper, which quickly became the largest national Native American news source in the country (2001-2008), Lise founded and directed The Native Voice Film Festival (as featured in National Geographic, 9/2004) and produced a number of projects for public television. She orchestrated the publication of the first national Native GOTV materials and intermittently served as a member of Barack Obama's traveling press corps (2008). In 2010, Lise returned to the East Coast to earn a Master in Public Administration at Harvard Kennedy School of Government (MC/MPA '11), and then served as a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (2011-2014). She also studied social entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School (2013) and documentary filmmaking (2013-14) at Harvard University VES. Post-Harvard, Lise has worked as a media and communications consultant, producer, and filmmaker. Her projects/clients have focused on social impact media for issues ranging from environmental protection (entangled-film.com) to public health (hbo.com/documentaries/heroin-cape-cod-usa). She has been a producer/social impact producer on four projects for HBO Documentary Films and for a number of other clients.