Guest Blogger

National Director of Communications, Teach Plus

Los Angeles, California

Anya Grottel-Brown is national director of communications at Teach Plus.

She works with Teach Plus staff and teachers nationwide to amplify their voices through the media and grow awareness of the organization’s programs and key areas of focus.

Prior to joining Teach Plus in 2014, Anya was a member of the executive team at two public relations agencies specializing in education and non-profit communications. While there, she developed successful PR/communications programs for the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation, Merck Institute for Science Education, Macaulay Honors College at CUNY, and the Siemens Foundation and the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, among others.

Anya’s work in education communications has been recognized with two PR News NonProfit PR Awards for Best Media Relations and one of the year’s Best Marketing Campaign and Best Event PR Awards, as well as with PR Daily’s Honorable Mention for Best Op-Ed. A seasoned media trainer, Anya has successfully prepared teachers and students nationwide to work with the press. Her article The Reluctant Spokesperson, published in the 2012-13 PRNews Media Training Guidebook, offers a roadmap for turning reluctant spokespeople into an audience invested in working with the media.

Born in Russia, Anya holds an Honors BA in East Asian Studies from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She spent five years in Japan, where she taught English and reported for a regional newspaper Ehime Shinbun. Anya’s cultural commentary was subsequently published in Meet Japan, a quarterly magazine of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Anya has traveled extensively through a dozen countries and has once gone around the world. A long-time New Yorker, she now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.