The People of Humanities Works

Catherine Rios teaches media, writing, and design-thinking at Penn State Harrisburg. Her commitment to interdisciplinary research and collaboration has been developed through initiatives such as The Collaboratory, a proposed interdisciplinary collaboration space, and 1+1: Discovery, Connection, Communication, a student engagement toolkit to enhance creativity in STEM learning. As a Faculty Scholar with the Office of General Education, she worked to promote a community of civic engagement for students and faculty, and to support educational equity and diversity at Penn State. These initiatives were recognized with the University’s Jack P. Royer Award for Active and Collaborative Learning in 2019. An award-winning filmmaker and writer, recent work includes Murder in the Garment District: The Grip of Organized Crime and the Decline of Labor in the United States, co-authored with the historian David Witwer, and released May 2020 by the New Press.

With more than 25 years of professional experience in corporate communications, marketing, public relations, brand visioning, multimedia communications, news and public affairs, and corporate citizenship/philanthropy, Rosemary Martinelli has worked for nonprofits and corporations throughout the United States. Her experience spans industries from retail to multimedia to academia to energy, nonprofit, and technology organizations. In those companies and organizations, she has served in a variety of capacities as a news reporter and producer, assignment editor, consultant, corporate spokesperson, marketing and philanthropy executive, and published writer. Her communications work also included tenures at various media organizations in the roles of news director, reporter, writer, creative services director, and marketing executive for stations including WDUQ (NPR), KDKA, WQED Multimedia, and WPXI-TV.

Ms. Martinelli’s professional work has been honored with dozens of communications and professional awards, including five Mid-Atlantic Emmy nominations for television promotion; a Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters Award; National Bellringer Awards for Community Relations Excellence; International Association of Business Humanities Works Golden Triangle Awards; Association for Women in Communications Matrix/Clarion Awards; Public Relations Society of America awards; Golden Quill Award for Journalistic Excellence; and awards from the American Gas Association and Utility Humanities Workss International.

Ms. Martinelli also received the YWCA of Greater Pittsburgh’s Tribute to Women Award in communications, one of the highest recognitions given to women of leadership in the Pittsburgh region. For her dedication to teaching, the University of Phoenix honored her with a Distinguished Faculty of the Year Award in 2011.

She has served, with distinction, on the boards of directors of a variety of community organizations, including Beginning with Books, the Roberto Clemente Foundation, The Press Club of Western Pennsylvania (where she has held various board leadership roles), and as chair of the Communications Advisory Board of The Pennsylvania State University—Beaver Campus, to name a few.

Ms. Martinelli is often called upon to write for journals, magazines and nationally-published books on topics related to marketing, media relations, communications and social responsibility. She most recently was a featured expert on community relations as a business strategy in the book “Recalculating,” a compendium of small business strategies from 97 of the country’s top business writers and consultants. She also authored articles and book chapters for PR News Press and the Council on Foundations. She is a sought-after speaker and trainer in communications, non-profit management, and integrated marketing workshops. In 2018 and 2019, she served as a conference speaker for the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Conference where she shared her professional work and provided training in 1) how to secure corporate and foundations grants for multimedia educational programs and video production and 2) how to strategically position communications and journalism degrees in a changing media society.

Ms. Martinelli is a summa cum laude graduate of Duquesne University and holds a master’s degree in corporate communications, with honors, also from Duquesne. She also completed the certification in corporate community relations from Boston College’s Center for Corporate Citizenship. In 2018, she completed all three levels of certification for Penn State’s World Campus, one of the nation’s leading educational schools for distance learning. She is a trained group facilitator and a graduate of Leadership Pittsburgh, Year XI, where she also served nine years on its board of directors.

For nearly 18 years, Ms. Martinelli was an active member of the adjunct faculties at local, regional and national colleges and universities, where she taught a variety of classes in English/business writing, advertising, marketing communications, journalism and media, presentation skills, media studies, ethics, organizational communications, and public relations, before joining the full-time communications and marketing faculties at Penn State—at the Greater Allegheny campus, in 2018—where she serves as the faculty advisor to the award-winning campus newspaper, The GA-Zette and chair of the Faculty Sentate. In 2020, Ms. Martinelli and her students partnered to launch a student-centric PR and marketing services agency called “Be Greater Creative” which organizes Penn State students to help serve nonprofits in the Pittsburgh area with public relations and marketing campaigns and related services.