Speaker Profile

Nicole Pelaez-Dandrea is vice president, audience engagement at ESPN – a division of ESPN’s content organization. Nicole leads the team responsible for the curation of content across all of ESPN’s digital experiences including ESPN.com, the ESPN App on mobile and OTT devices and ESPN’s Fantasy App. Through this role, she engages colleagues across the organization to prioritize, optimize and evaluate the performance of distributed content – including the new ESPN+ direct-to-consumer product – while managing the needs of a diverse group of stakeholders.

Nicole joined ESPN in 2007 to help launch an in-house sports statistics department called Stats & Information (SIG). In SIG, she was responsible for the development and implementation of a suite of products and tools that allowed content teams across ESPN to produce and integrate storylines with base and advanced statistics. She oversaw significant company-wide initiatives that spanned all areas of Content and Technology and worked with multiple departments and numerous vendors. Products ranged from interactive and virtual graphic executions to a variety of web media and mobile applications. Nicole was named vice president in 2019 and in 2021 added oversight of digital video content to her role.

Nicole earned a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Florida in 2000. She entered the industry in 1997 working on the sports desk of the Gainesville Sun. Over the course of her career, Nicole has amassed more than 23 years of management experience in various industries. She held a board position with the WICT New England Chapter for five years, was named WICT New England’s 2013 Woman to Watch and was FOLIO’s Top Women in Media Honoree in 2020.