Former NBC producer named director of leadership institute

Grace

Stephen Grace, former general manager of the largest educational cable access channel in the country and a producer for NBC's "Today" show, has been appointed executive director of the Presidents Leadership Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The institute is home of the nationally recognized Presidents Leadership Class (PLC), a rigorous academic and experiential four-year leadership training program for top CU-Boulder students. Each year, 50 of CU's top-ranked entering freshmen are selected to be PLC Scholars and awarded merit-based scholarships.

Grace has more than 25 years of experience in nonprofit management, broadcast journalism and academia. He served as president of the Los Angeles Cable Television Access Corporation and as general manager of cable access channel LA36. During his tenure, he raised more than $2 million in grants and production fees and built closer ties to the community and local colleges and universities. He won an Emmy Award for local programming and the Carrie Chapman Leadership Award from the League of Women Voters for his efforts to broadcast local election information.

He traveled around the world while producing "Today" show segments and programs for NBC News. He later was a founding partner of Popular Arts Entertainment, one of the largest independent news production groups in the United States. More recently, he was an adjunct faculty member in communications studies at California State University Los Angeles, where he specialized in new media and technology.