Dana Spiardi

My Fifteen Minutes of Fame – in Bulgaria

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If we all experience what Andy Warhol called our “fifteen minutes of fame,” I had mine in Bulgaria, a small Balkan nation I visited six times in the early 1990s. As a Westinghouse PR manager it was my job to inform the Bulgarian media of my company’s capabilities related to the country’s nuclear program. I … Read more

Castles, Kafka, Controversy: My Days in Czechoslovakia

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I touched down in Prague in April 1991 to launch a public relations campaign for Westinghouse Electric Corporation – 16 months after the collapse of communism. And that’s when my real PR education began. Forging relationships with skeptical journalists is hard enough, but imagine the difficulty of communicating to audiences stifled by 50 years of … Read more

Those Ukraine Girls – and Guys – Really Knocked Me Out

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Some of my most interesting work experiences took place in Ukraine in the early 1990s, when Westinghouse Electric Corporation sent me to Kiev to work with representatives from that country’s nuclear industry. Ukraine’s Soviet-designed Chernobyl plant was the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986. But Chernobyl was only one of more than … Read more