
Recently, Michele Ganeless was named CEO of Comic Relief, a global organization dedicated to eradicating poverty. She is best known for her tenure as President of Comedy Central, a position she held from 2004-2016. Under her leadership, the network grew to be the number one brand in comedy across all platforms. Prior to her role as President at Comedy Central, Michele held programming and leadership roles at USA Network, Comedy Central and MTV. During her multiple terms at Comedy Central, Michele oversaw the growth of the Comedy Central brand as franchises including the Emmy® and Peabody® Award-winning “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” “The Colbert Report,” “South Park,” “Inside Amy Schumer,” and “Key & Peele,” dominated the cultural landscape.
Since leaving Comedy Central, Ganeless has focused her energy and expertise on producing and consulting. She is a sought after advisor on all areas of content strategy—most recently working in FAST and streaming. Currently working on content programming and strategy as a consultant for Lionsgate, Ganeless was also a key architect of the original content strategy at Peacock, having built the content operations, editorial and scheduling teams in 2019. Her first feature film, Egg, starring Christina Hendricks, Alysia Reiner and Anna Camp, premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. She is also a co-producer on Irreplaceable You, which can be seen on Netflix. Both films were written and directed by women, and were produced with a clear mandate: hire more women behind the camera, thus helping to level the playing field for women in entertainment, an issue at the heart of Ganeless’ decision to continue creating content as an independent producer. Ganeless sits on the Board of Directors for Comic Relief, Inc, dedicated to ending intergenerational poverty around the world, and on the advisory board of Northwestern University’s School of Communications, where she earned her bachelor’s degree.