
Chanelle
Kalfas

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company
The New York Times
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position
Head of Enterprise Brand & Top-of-Funnel Marketing
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website
about the speaker
Chanelle Kalfas is a brand manager, strategist and part-time artist currently serving as Head of Enterprise Brand Marketing at The New York Times. Before joining the brand marketing team at the Times, she led teams of strategists in developing boundary-pushing partnership programs at T Brand, the Times’s branded content studio.
Chanelle started her career agency-side, as an account lead for the global Maybelline business, but quickly realizer her passion lay in surfacing human insights and storytelling – and she has done just that, serving as the resident strategist and storyteller for several industry-leading brands. In her 16 year career, she has led global brand strategy and creative development for iconic brands like Star Wars, Marvel, My Little Pony, consulted on brand positioning and organizational change with major media organizations like CNN, Freeform, eOne and Viacom, and led research that surfaced powerful consumer insights for brands like Diageo, Taco Bell, and many more.
Outside of her work at the Times, Chanelle is passionate about art and design, and was an inaugural member of the Guggenheim Museum’s Technology and Innovation Council, which is focused on convening innovator in technology, architecture, and design to explore intersections within the cultural sector and museum space. She also served as a judge for the 2022 One Show and was named as one of Ad Age’s Leading Women that same year.
A New Jersey native and proud first generation Ghanaian-American, Chanelle lives in Harlem with her husband Ben and their endlessly energetic toddler Felix.