About: Mary Trudel

Mary Trudel is a creative, award winning marketing professional who brings more than 20 years of experience in strategic counsel, branding, reputation management, media relations and program management to Trudel | MacPherson to help clients achieve measurable, sustainable social change. Prior to 2010, Mary was a Senior Officer at The Wallace Foundation heading communications for the foundation’s arts unit. Mary is adept at coalition building and designing stakeholder engagement strategies for profit and non-profit organizations. She credits her experience as a consumer products branding expert for her ability to make a difference for clients engaged in social marketing and public will building.

While at Wallace, Mary managed communications strategies around innovative city-wide audience development programs and national arts learning collaborative initiatives in major cities that forged ongoing partnerships in each city with the department of education, the mayor’s office, the arts and culture sector and the public. She also handled communications of groundbreaking arts research products as well as developing events and outreach to share effective practices and ideas. She played a key role in the launch of the landmark RAND report Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Benefits of the Arts and other high profile research studies.

Before joining Wallace, Mary served as group director, consumer marketing & technology communications, at Hill & Knowlton; executive vice president, consumer/consumer healthcare, at Ruder Finn Public Relations Worldwide; and president of The Rowland Company Worldwide. She developed the Go Red For Women national awareness campaign for the American Heart Association, and managed multi-office programs for DuPont, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and Volkswagen, among other Fortune 100 companies.

Nationally recognized as an audience engagement and special events expert, Mary is active in the New York City arts and non-profit community and on-line via thought leader blogging on artsjournal.com and Americans for the Arts ARTSblog. In 2010 she and Rory co-produced the Arts Forum series at The New York Times Center, in partnership with the Alliance for the Arts and The New York Times Community Affairs Department. In 2007, Mary co-founded ArtsCom, an invitation-only organization of senior communications executives from top-flight arts organizations in metropolitan New York dedicated to the exchange of ideas and the advancement of the arts, for which she manages special events and seminars.

Mary is a magna cum laude graduate of the City College of New York (CCNY), where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She is a winner of numerous awards for her work in consumer products marketing communications and community relations and she was named a PR All-Star by Inside PR magazine. Mary began her career as a singer and attended the Manhattan School of Music.

 

Learn more:

• Read about our other principal, Rory MacPherson.
• Find out more about our collaborators.
• Read testimonials about our work.