Notes from the Class of 1997

Laura (Schneider) Moetz (MJour) joined Accenture PLC in September 2016 as a marketing and communications manager based in New York City. Previously, Laura was a manager of internal and employee communications for Willis Towers Watson. 

Kelly Graziadei (Advert) recently became the entrepreneur in residence at Foundation Capital, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California. She has over 20 years of leadership experience in technology and consumer internet.

Don Heider (PhDComm) served as dean of the Loyola University Chicago School of Communication from 2008 to 2018 and received the Scripps Howard Foundation Journalism & Mass Communication Administrator of the Year Award in August 2018. Shortly after, he accepted a position with Santa Clara University, where he is the chief executive of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

Since 2003, Norm Shearer (Advert) has been chief creative officer at Cactus, one of Colorado’s top creative advertising agencies. A graduate of the Art Center College of Design in California, Norm lives in Denver with his wife, Dawn. 

Anthony Martini (Hist, Jour) is director of content strategy and design with AT&T, where he leads a team that develops guidance for 150,000+ frontline representatives and call center agents across the company. He, his wife and two daughters love exploring Colorado and supporting local charities like Bags of Fun and the American Heart Association.

Lee Hood (MJour; PhDComm’01) is an associate professor at Loyola University Chicago where she won the national Edward L. Bliss Award for Distinguished Broadcast Journalism Education in 2018. She taught broadcast journalism at CU Boulder from 2000 to 2009 after an 18-year career in TV news.

Alanna Rizzo (Bus’97; MJour’03), a seven-time Emmy Award winner, rejoined MLB Network’s roster of on-air personalities where she is a contributor to High Heat with Christopher Russo. Rizzo has also covered the Los Angeles Dodgers’ trips to the World Series in 2017, 2018 and 2020. She most recently won the 2020 Southern California Sports Broadcasters Association’s TV Reporter Award. In July 2021, Rizzo made history as part of the first all-woman broadcast crew to call a Major League Baseball game. In 2019, she founded Guidry’s Guardian Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps rescue dogs from the streets and out of high-kill shelters.

This year, Kelly Graziadei (Advert) and her co-founder, Joanna Lee Shevelenko, announced and closed their first institutional venture capital fund, f7 Ventures. The venture capital fund was one of the largest first-time funds launched by female operators. This is particularly notable with only 4% of VC firms in the U.S. led by women. The $50 million fund includes a respected and diverse set of limited partners, and 70% of their investments have been to underrepresented founders.