Barbara Chen on the NYPD, Communication Strategy, and Positionality

Barbara Chen

In The Interview: Episode #11, Ciara Pressler interviews Barbara Chen, strategic communicator, independent consultant, and writer.

Barbara and Ciara talk about…

  • Nuances of working inside a major city police department
  • Honoring the complexity of complex problems
  • Considerations when shaping a complicated message
  • The danger in seeing police brutality as isolated incidents rather than recognizing the totality and continuum of indignity, injury, and injustice
  • Positionality in the current discourse

Barbara Chen is an independent consultant and writer in New York who has held major communications roles at the NYPD, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Columbia University. She moved to Manhattan from L.A. after 9/11 to work for ABC News and, after serving as an assignment editor and broadcast producer during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Hurricane Katrina, the southeast Asia tsunami and political conventions of 2004, and the network’s foray into digital television, transitioned back to PR and into media relations. She began her career at DIRECTV, Inc. (now AT&T) as a public relations coordinator, pre-Y2K.
Chen is a former New York chapter vice president of the national Asian American Journalists Association. She has provided pro bono marketing communications counsel to nonprofits in New York City since 2008 through the Taproot Foundation, working with a Bronx-based creative arts program for youth in transition from juvenile justice and foster care, the Friends of Hudson River Park, and Downtown Community Television, a documentary production house and community media arts center in Lower Manhattan.

Where to find Barbara:
https://www.instagram.com/hollyjoyluc…