Joan Cooney

Joan Cooney General Information

Biography

Ms. Joan Ganz Cooney is a Co-Founder and serves as Lifetime Honorary Trustee at Sesame Workshop. She is also a Lifetime Honorary Trustee. She also serves as the Board Member at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Mrs. Cooney received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Arizona. She began her career as a reporter in her hometown of Phoenix. From 1954 to 1962 she worked as a publicist for NBC in New York and for the U.S. Steel Hour, a highly acclaimed CBS drama series. She was an award-winning public affairs producer for New York's WNET/Thirteen before conducting the study for Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1966, entitled, "The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education," which led to the founding of the Workshop. Mrs. Cooney is presently a Director at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a Trustee of the Paley Center for Media and The New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and is a Lifetime Trustee of WNET Channel 13/Educational Broadcasting Corporation and of the National Child Labor Committee. She once held Board positions with the Chase Manhattan Bank, Xerox Corporation, Johnson & Johnson Corporation, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and Edison Schools, Inc. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She has served as a member of the President's Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties, the President's Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, the Advisory Committee for Trade Negotiations, the Carnegie Foundation's National Panel on the High School, and the United Nation's Reorientation of UN Information Activities Task Force. Among her many honorary degrees are those from Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Barnard, New York University, Smith, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Oberlin, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, and her alma mater, the University of Arizona, from which she received the Centennial Medallion Award in 1989. Mrs. Cooney has received numerous awards including a Daytime Emmy for Lifetime Achievement in 1989 and, in 1990, was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame and received the Founders Award from the International Council of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. In 1995, President Clinton awarded Mrs. Cooney the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, and in 1998, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Mrs. Cooney was honored with the Annenberg Public Policy Center's award for Distinguished Contribution to Children and Television, noting Sesame Street as being "the quintessential children's educational program" and most recently, she was honored with the National Endowment for the Humanities Award by President George W. Bush.