FER_Hero_Bios.jpg

Cinny Kennard

  2. Members
  3. Cinny Kennard

Cinny Kennard, Executive Director at The Annenberg Foundation, has decades of award-winning leadership and Executive Management in the non-profit sector with established national brands including National Public Radio, Smithsonian Institution, Pew Charitable Trusts and The Federal Communications Commission. Cinny is also is an award-winning broadcast journalist who currently serves on several boards including the Los Angeles Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) at Pepperdine School of Public Policy, The Carole Kneeland Project for Responsible Television Journalism and is a longtime member of the Trusteeship of the International Women’s Forum.

At the Annenberg Foundation, Cinny has worked with the chairman Wallis Annenberg and the board on local, national and global grantmaking in education, in arts and culture, health care and underserved communities.  She has also launched several impactful projects including, AnnenbergTech, the Wallis Annenberg GenSpace scheduled to open in 2021 in Los Angeles, the Wallis Annenberg PetSpace, has a key board governance seat on the Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts and has worked to craft a public/private partnership to construct permanent supportive housing for the homeless in South Los Angeles. Kennard has bolstered the Foundation management team and presided over an organization which has now given away over 5 billion dollars across Los Angeles, the nation and the globe over 30-years.

Before joining the Annenberg Foundation in January 2015, she was the Senior Vice President of Programming at the Smithsonian Institution and served as a Senior Advisor to the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands creating and driving the outreach plan to bring top Washington D.C. elected officials to Sunnylands, including President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi JinPing for the Sunnylands Summit.

Prior to that, she served as managing director/managing editor of NPR West from 2003 to 2009. During her tenure, NPR West expanded from 20 to nearly 90 full-time employees. Previously, she served as an executive project director and journalism professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. Before that, she was a CBS News correspondent based at various times in Los Angeles, London and Moscow covering battlefield front lines, and before that a local television news reporter at WFAA-TV in Dallas, KHOU-TV in Houston and WANE TV.

Kennard has launched several projects aimed at improving broadcast journalism, including Reliable Resources, the $1.5 million Pew Charitable Trust/USC Annenberg project to improve broadcast television political coverage. She is a co-founder and executive board member of the Carole Kneeland Project for Responsible Television Journalism, and for nine-years, she served as a jury member for the 2015 Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award for excellence in broadcast journalism.

She has been recognized with the DuPont Columbia University Award for coverage of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and has also been awarded a CINE Golden Eagle among other various awards as an Executive Producer for filmmaking. An accomplished writer, Kennard helped write Best of Both Worlds: Museums, Libraries, and Archives in a Digital Age by G. Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; co-authored a piece for The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation; co-authored “Characteristics of War Coverage by Female Correspondents” in Media and Conflict in the 21st Century; and authored numerous articles for The Huffington Post.