​Susan is the Creative Director for simply put and the WE COUNT! Project.  A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, she designed for multiple publications before being named the first-ever Creative Director for the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts. It was under her leadership that Lincoln Center’s award-winning design department and iconic style were established.  Even today the Center's brand reflects the visual and narrative structures she put in place.

 

Susan left to establish the design department for Juno Online Services, an early tech innovator.  While she enjoyed the challenges of new media, she quickly realized that the company's culture neither understood nor valued the importance of design and continuity in their customer interface.

​

So, when that bubble burst, she formed Panetta Creative, a unique studio focussed on what had become her passion -  the intersection of design, education and storytelling.  Susan often invites her clients to collaborate beyond usual boundaries of researcher, writer and designer -  to center an aesthetic narrative across the project.  She has created unique visual stories with musicians such as Laurie Berkner and publications including the Long Island Parent Magazine.  A researcher by nature, Panetta reviewed the limited font and readablity literature with the What To Expect Foundationand while creating an evolving accessibility standard for their lower-literacy materials. 

​

Susan also established and runs the Pulitzer & Panetta Writing and Art Studio with New York Times best-selling author Lisa Pulitzer.   Grounded in her educational philosophy, these dynamic workshops merge literary and visual expression, offering children and makers of all ages a chance to create art.

​

​

​



​

​

Lisa is the Executive Director and Publisher of simply put - a non-profit publishing and programming organization that reaches neglected audiences in the US and around the world with empowering and engaging parenting, education and health information. 

​

A projected census undercount of children 0-5 from marginalized communities inspired WE COUNT! the first in the simply put: Civics series. That campaign, funded by the Carnegie Corporation and the Census Funders Collaborative, included an adorable  read-aloud book so children could learn  "how to count," as family members learned why "we all  count" in the 2020 Census.  Illustrated by diverse artists, and translated into 15 languages, the WE COUNT! book and the animation (narrated by Auli'i Cravalho. star of Disney's Moana), were free online, as were early childhood professional development training, curriculum, and event-marketing tools for libraries and community programs.  The evaluated, evidence- based campaign reached over 600,000 families; and was adopted by hundreds of national and local organizations (ALA, Head Start...) and customized for many states (ie. CA, NY, USVI...) across the country.   

  

Before launching Simply Put, Lisa was the co-founder and Executive Director of The What To Expect Foundation which she formed with a limited license to build upon the goodwill of that bestselling brand. She created award-winning cause marketing campaigns in partnership with Nissan, Clorox, and GSK that disseminated important messages to parents (on car seat safety, healthy homes, the importance of immunization) that raised over $7 million for the Foundation. She used those funds to create Baby Basics, a comprehensive pregnancy guide for "neglected audiences" that combines narrative, illustration and evidence-based health information to entertain and engage women who don't expect to find their experiences or concerns reflected in the pages of a book.  Baby Basics (in English, Spanish and Mandarin) has sold over 750,000 copies to non-profit agencies that support at-risk families across the US.  The book inspired the Baby Basics program, a new paradigm of health education that encourages a woman's personal and intellectual growth during the teachable moment of pregnancy. With extensive training in strength-based educational strategies and the Baby Basics curriculum, thousands of medical professionals, health educators and community workers now help women to actively seek, read and engage with health information to build critical thinking skills and social networks during pregnancy.

 

In 2014, in partnership with the US Department of State’s Office of Global Women’s Issues, Lisa created and published Big Belly Business (Liberia) and Babu Barta (Bangladesh) -- all new, re-imagined pregnancy books, curriculum and group literacy education programming created with - and by the women and men of these two developing nations. simply put continues to build and expand this grass roots project with government agencies and NGOs.

​

simply put also draws upon Lisa’s expertise in commercial book publishing. A former publicist at Henry Holt and Little Brown Publishers, Marketing Director at The New Press, and Associate Publisher at Workman;  she ran campaigns for many titles, including the bestselling What To Expect When You’re Expecting paenting series and the Brain Quest educational program.