Angela Marie Dejene
Angela Marie Dejene is president and founder of Dejene Communications. The firm provides management positioning, executive communications counsel and top-tier media placement to forward-thinking non-profit organizations, front-line foundations and for-profit companies who support the vital and urgent mission of better health for all.
Throughout her career, Angela has provided C-suite communications and policy counsel to some of the nation’s most visible international corporations, health care providers and university leaders.
She has pitched and placed hundreds of print, online and broadcast stories for clients in top national media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, TIME Magazine, NPR, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, Fortune, Forbes, The Hill, ABC Good Morning America, BBC, CNN, The TODAY Show, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, MSNBC, CNBC, PBS NewsHour, WIRED, Modern Healthcare, STAT News, KFF Health News and NEJM Catalyst. (Visit the news tab for a comprehensive list of secured coverage.)
Behind her standout media placement success is Angela’s customized and rigorous training of her executive clients to stay on message, stay abreast of the news of their industry, respond quickly to breaking headlines and to be intelligent, relevant interpreters on the topics of most immediate interest to reporters, editors and broadcast news producers.
This work has resulted in consistent top-tier placement, recognition and positioning of client executives and spokespersons as thought leaders, whenever and wherever their industry or company is covered in the media.
Rural health, global response
Dejene Communications currently provides national media and thought leadership strategy for the nation’s largest rural health system, Sanford Health. Angela successfully brought national and global media attention to Sanford for setting the highest standard for the COVID-19 response in rural America and for its commitment to delivering world-class care to patients in rural, underserved parts of the Midwest through a transformative $350 million virtual care initiative.
Over the course of five years, Dejene Communications has dramatically increased Sanford’s national media coverage, garnering hundreds of national media stories — 160 in 2023 alone — including dozens of high-profile feature placements. These included a front-page Washington Post story looking at how visa delays are impacting the nation’s nursing shortages, an 11-minute feature documentary by STAT News on how Sanford Health is using virtual care to expand access in rural areas and top-tier placements in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, POLITICO, Bloomberg, Fortune, Forbes, Axios, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, Scientific American, KFF Health News and NEJM Catalyst.
In addition, Dejene Communications has also placed the health system’s leaders in high-profile national and global platforms, including the POLITICO Health Care Summit, the Milken Institute’s Future of Health Summit and the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Angela has also been instrumental in planning and organizing the annual Summit on the Future of Rural Health Care, now in its third year. At last year’s Summit, Sanford Health convened health system CEOs, industry experts and prominent tech leaders for candid, wide-ranging conversations focused on reimagining the rural health care workforce of tomorrow. Speakers included the renowned Dr. Zeke Emanuel from the University of Pennsylvania; Dr. Joseph Betancourt, President of the Commonwealth Fund; Kasey Buckles, PhD, Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame; Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, President of the American Medical Association; Mark Parkinson, President & CEO of the American Health Care Association; Dr. David Shulkin, Ninth Secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; and Antoinette Thomas, Chief Experience Officer at Microsoft, among others.
Nearly 200 guests attended the invitation-only Summit in Sioux Falls and more than 3,700 streamed the event online. Over the last two years, feature coverage from the Summit has been published in leading industry press including Modern Healthcare, Becker’s Healthcare, HealthLeaders, Fierce Healthcare, MedCity News and McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, among others.
Dejene Communications provides ongoing counsel and support to global communication teams and leading advocates currently and boldly engaging some of the greatest continuing health care challenges of our times.
Life sciences and medical technology
Angela advises senior management teams at a major global corporation that ranks high in the Forbes Global 2000 list. She supported its successful expansion from a leading global supplier of photographic equipment to a major biotech giant with leading products in biologics manufacturing, medical technology and medical imaging.
The company’s medical division provides one of the world’s most advanced digital mammography technologies to optimize breast cancer detection. By leveraging longstanding media relationships and crafting focused, strategic pitches, Angela secured top-tier feature coverage of this offering, including an in-depth feature story in Fortune, highlighting the way the company pivoted the use case of its ultrasound technology for aiding in the diagnosis of COVID-19, and an impactful editorial in MedTechDive, authored by the company’s president and CEO on the importance of annual breast cancer screenings.
While working with this client, Angela secured comprehensive media coverage surrounding the announcement of their new $2 billion facility in North Carolina in 2021. The announcement was covered by national and trade press including The Associated Press, Fierce Pharma, Contract Pharma, Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, BioPharma Reporter, Endpoints News, PharmTech, Pharmaceutical Technology, BioSpace, BioProcess International, and Manufacturing Dive among others.
During COVID-19, Angela also secured extensive coverage of the client’s vaccine manufacturing and development efforts in partnership with a global pharma company, with regular updates in national and international news outlets, as well as industry and trade publications.
She also supported this client through a successful acquisition, marking an important new chapter in the emergence of the Texas biosciences industry as a center for world-class development and manufacturing of life-saving vaccines to protect people around the world from the next major infectious disease outbreak.
Lifestyle and consumer media
Dejene Communications also supported the client’s consumer products business, securing hundreds of placements in top-tier lifestyle outlets, including Allure, Bustle, BuzzFeed, Glamour, Teen Vogue, and more.
In 2016, she spearheaded a desk-side media tour for The Greatest American Road Trip, sponsored by this client, which celebrated the 100-year anniversary of the National Park Service Angela secured coverage of the project in numerous national outlets including, Smithsonian Magazine, Condé Nast, National Geographic, GMA, Fox Lifestyle, Travel & Leisure, Real Simple, HuffPost and Lonely Planet.
Global health care practice
Angela was one of the youngest PR executives in the U.S. to head up a health care practice at a national agency, which dramatically catapulted to the top of the health care heap, earning recognition as the number one-ranked health care PR agency in Texas and listing as one of the top 50 health care PR firms in the country according to the prestigious J.R. O’Dwyer Company.
Among her many other national and international media credits, she was part of the team that provided strategic communications and executive counsel to one of the nation’s largest public universities, ranked among the top 25 by U.S. News and World Report. The university had received one of the largest federal research grants ever awarded to the state of Texas to fund one of the world’s leading vaccine production and counter-terrorism centers. That Texas center today provides emergency front-line preparedness against emerging infectious diseases, including pandemic influenza, Ebola and Zika, in addition to chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats.
In 2015 and 2016, Angela’s commentaries on the power of communication to impact life-saving health care were published by O’Dwyers.
She wrote: “It turns out that the hardest problem in bringing modern healthcare to places in the world that lack even basic necessities is sometimes not the funding nor even the logistics of delivering life-saving medicines to remote corners of the world. The biggest challenge may be raising awareness and understanding among those who most need help.”
Angela also led national media relations efforts on behalf of the university for a new $91 million state-of-the-art Pandemic Influenza Vaccine Facility, developed in partnership with the world’s sixth largest pharmaceutical company, to help protect the public against infectious disease threats.
During the Ebola outbreak in 2014, she provided rapid response Tier One media support for the chair of the Texas Task Force on Infectious Disease Preparedness and Response.
MIT and digital health
In 2016, Angela spearheaded a strategic media relations campaign with the MIT Hacking Medicine team to host a three-day hack-a-thon workshop called HackMed Health House during the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. The festival celebrates the convergence of the tech, film and television and music industries.
The MIT team is working to solve some of health care’s biggest challenges by connecting the best and most diverse minds and cutting-edge technologies. Since holding the first-ever health hack-a-thon in 2010, the MIT Hacking Medicine group has hosted more than 200 events in 30+ countries and 79 cities, resulting in more than $2.5 billion in funding for health care startups.
Children’s health care
Angela previously represented the National Association of School Nurses in Washington, D.C. where she worked closely with the White House, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Justice.
She has actively advocated and promoted the passage of several other transformational pieces of legislation that have since improved the lives of millions of children, women and families including the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, the Violence Against Women Act, the Public Health and Prevention Fund and the Medicaid “free care” policy. She also worked with bipartisan Members of Congress to write and introduce legislation aimed at increasing health care access in schools for our nation’s children.
The Affordable Care Act
Angela began her career in Washington, D.C. at Families USA, one of the most influential health care advocacy groups in the country. Families USA played a pivotal role in the passage of the transformational Affordable Care Act.
Angela was closely involved at Families USA in stakeholder meetings involving insurers, hospitals, women’s and children’s health groups, health providers, the pharmaceutical industry and business and labor groups. The alliance, led by Families USA, included powerful interest groups ranging from America’s Health Insurance Plans, Kaiser Permanente, American Academy of Pediatrics, Federation of American Hospitals, AARP and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
As reported by the New York Times, this diverse coalition led the successful national effort to attract industry support for the most important and consequential health care law passed since the enactment of Medicare in 1965.
Midwest roots
Angela grew up on the American Midwestern prairie in Crookston, Minnesota, a town of 8,000 people tucked away in the northwest corner of the state, 100 miles south of the Canadian border. It was not uncommon for the wind chill in the region to plummet to -50 degrees Fahrenheit during the winters. Her summers were spent with family on her maternal grandfather’s farm in rural South Dakota.
Angela holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and government/international affairs from Augustana University located in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Her published commentary on the value of her liberal arts education at Augustana has been widely distributed.
During her college career, Angela studied abroad in Chile and Guatemala, participating in a program that focused on a broad range of issues affecting women in the developing world. In both countries, she met with political leaders, women entrepreneurs, nurses, single mothers and students.
Listening to women share stories of their struggles and dreams ignited a continuing passion to create opportunities for women everywhere to build healthy, empowered and secure futures for their families. It was also during her time traveling across Latin America that Angela began to first understand how health care issues disproportionately affect women and children.
Angela spent nearly a decade working in Washington, DC, where she lobbied on health care policy issues that affected low-income families, minorities, women and children. In 2013, she moved to Austin, Texas, exchanging cold, wet Northeast winters for 300 days of sunshine. But her heart wasn’t deep in the heart of Texas, and she missed her home in America’s Midwest. She moved back north to Minneapolis/St. Paul in the middle of the winter in 2019.
Philanthropy and causes
Angela has served as a delegate to the UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York City where she represented the Lutheran World Federation. She was also named a Fellow by the Johnson & Johnson School Health Leadership Program, a high-level international nursing intervention and education program to improve the delivery of health care to school children around the world.
Angela is an active supporter of the Fistula Foundation, Children’s Defense Fund, Augustana University, United Nations Foundation Shot@Life, A Glimmer of Hope, ELCA International Women Leaders and Bridges to Prosperity.
In 2018, she shared a reflection on her time at the United Nations’ 62nd Commission on the Status of Women for ELCA World Hunger.
She has served as a trustee of Portico Benefit Services since 2018, which provides employee benefits for ministers and church staff, social ministry organizations and colleges and universities affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She is also a President’s Council advisor to Global Refuge (formerly Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service), one of the oldest and most effective agencies relocating and supporting asylum seekers and immigrants, welcoming more than 750,000 over 80 years of compassionate service.
Angela was previously on the board of directors for the half Helen Foundation, which has provided innovative vision and hearing screenings to over 68,000 children in Texas. The foundation is committed to a future where children, families and communities are free of preventable health conditions.