September 2014

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization best known as the producer of PBS’s “Sesame Street,” has named a former Nickelodeon and HIT Entertainment executive, Jeffrey D. Dunn, as its president and chief executive. Dunn replaces H. Melvin Ming, who is retiring. He will be the first outsider to lead Sesame Workshop, which was founded by Joan Ganz Cooney in 1968 as the Children’s Television Workshop.

Dunn has had close ties to the organization in his past jobs. Sesame Workshop and HIT -- the company behind “Thomas & Friends,” where he served as president and chief executive -- were among the original partners in the preschool cable channel Sprout. At Nickelodeon, where he was group chief operating officer of the Nickelodeon Networks and president of Nickelodeon Film and Enterprises, Dunn created the Noggin joint venture with Sesame Workshop, which ended in 2002. While at Nickelodeon, Dunn significantly expanded the company’s international business, as well as its feature film, publishing, live theatrical, hotel, restaurant and theme park ventures. Most recently, Dunn was a 2014 Advanced Leadership Initiative fellow at Harvard, after leaving HIT in 2012, when it was sold to Mattel.

Between Facebook and the cloud, it’s realistic to expect that thousands of photos and videos of us will exist forever. Future generations will have a better window into the everyday lives of millennials than humans have had for any generation in history. That change is dramatic, but could be just the beginning of a revolution in remembrance, given the world sketched out by Martine Rothblatt in her new book, “Virtually Human: The Promise and the Peril of Digital Immortality.”

Former Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Robert M. McDowell joined Wiley Rein LLP’s Washington, DC office as a partner in the firm’s communications practice.

McDowell will provide strategic legal, business, and public policy advice to clients on domestic and international matters in the telecommunications, media, technology and digital media industries. McDowell was originally nominated for the FCC by President George Bush in 2006 and renominated by President Barack Obama in 2009. McDowell graduated cum laude from Duke University. After serving as chief legislative aide to a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, he attended the Marshall-Wythe School of Law at the College of William and Mary. Upon his graduation from law school, McDowell joined the Washington office of the national law firm Arter & Hadden. Prior to joining the FCC, he was senior vice president for the Competitive Telecommunications Association (CompTel), an industry group representing competitive facilities-based telecommunications service providers and their supplier partners. He also was the executive vice president and general counsel of America’s Carriers Telecommunications Association (ACTA), which merged with CompTel in 1999. Most recently, he was a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for the Economics of the Internet.

Nese Guendelsberger has been named Deputy Chief of the Federal Communications Commission’s International Bureau.

Prior to joining the International Bureau, Guendelsberger served as the Chief of the Spectrum and Competition Policy Division in the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau. She also worked in the Wireline Competition Bureau, in the Wireless Bureau’s former Auctions and Industry Analysis Division, and in the International Bureau. In her new position, Guendelsberger will spearhead the International Bureau’s numerous bilateral, regional, and multilateral initiatives. She will also oversee mergers and transactions coming before the International Bureau. Prior to joining the FCC in 2000, Guendelsberger taught law at the University of Baltimore and the University of Ankara and was a consultant on international law matters. Guendelsberger has law degrees from the University of Paris I (Pantheon-Sorbonne) and the University of Ankara, as well as an LL.M. from the University of Michigan.