Michele Wells

Wells is a seasoned public relations and marketing professional with more than 30 years’ experience in public relations, executive media training, marketing communications, crisis communications, sales management and business management.  Wells’s career has focused on professional service businesses, high technology, food products, hospitality/food service and issues management in a variety of industries.

Her professional experience includes media relations and community relations work for Lockton Companies, LLC, Kamlet Shepherd & Reichert, LLP, the Colorado law offices of Hogan & Hartson, the Denver Newspaper Agency, Arthur Anderson (Denver), Hein & Company, Prudential Property Company and La Salle Partners. She has also developed and implemented national public relations and marketing programs for IdentiGEN, Ltd., Panorama Meats, Inc., Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, Coleman Natural Products, Meyer Natural Angus, Westin Hotels, Intrado, Head Sports, StorageTek, Exabyte Corporation, Miller Brewing and R.T. French Company.

Projects she has managed have won more than 40 awards from the Public Relations Society of America, including a Silver Anvil for Employee Communications, the organization’s highest national award, for her work for the Denver Newspaper Agency related to the combination of the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post in 2001.

She started her career in the big-agency world of Burson-Marsteller, then ran her own public relations firm from 1983 to 1993, when it merged with The Johnston Group to form JohnstonWells, one of Denver’s leading PR firms. After a four-year stint in Denver’s fine-dining restaurant business, and a year’s residence in Amsterdam, where she consulted with Burson-Marsteller’s office in The Hague, Wells returned to Colorado and re-started her consulting business.

Wells is currently on the Board of Directors of the Humane Society of Boulder Valley. She is a past board member of the Women’s Bean Project in Denver, the Boulder chapter of the Slow Food International Association, the Colorado chapter of the American Institute of Wine and Food and Boulder County’s food bank, Community Food Share. She also served on various committees with the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce. Wells holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Daniela Kuper

Daniela Kuper is a 30-year advertising and marketing veteran. She owned and managed one of Colorado’s most acclaimed advertising agencies, Kuper Advertising, which became McClain Finlon Advertising when she departed in 1989 to pursue work on her first novel. She has been an independent advertising and marketing consultant since that time.

In addition to her advertising work, she is a published fiction writer of short stories and a novel, Hunger and Thirst (St. Martins Press).