Karen Breslau

A veteran journalist and communications strategist, Karen Breslau joined the Dewey Square Group in January 2011 and is responsible for designing and managing media relations, strategic and crisis communications for clients of the firm’s California practice. Karen joined Dewey Square from the Office of the President of the University of California, the nation’s premier public research university system. As director of executive communications, she handled speechwriting, social media, and strategic communications on behalf of the president of the 10-campus U.C. system.

Prior to joining the University of California, Breslau was a correspondent for Newsweek magazine for 20 years, most recently serving as San Francisco bureau chief, where she led political and environmental coverage from the West Coast. Earlier, she served as Newsweek’s White House correspondent, covering the Clinton administration. Breslau began her Newsweek career as a foreign correspondent based in Germany and Eastern Europe, where she covered major historical events including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Romanian revolution, the Soviet coup, German unification and the Yugoslav Civil War. Karen has also covered the presidential campaigns of Al Gore (2000) and Hillary Clinton (2008). Karen began her journalism career as a producer and reporter for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. She has received numerous awards for her journalistic work.

Karen is also a widely recognized public speaker and media commentator, with appearances on CNN Inside Politics, ABC News Nightline and Good Morning America, PBS NewsHour, NPR’s All Things Considered and Washington Week in Review, and the Commonwealth Club of California, among others. Her freelance work has been published in the New York Times magazine, MORE and WIRED.

Karen holds a B.A. magna cum laude from the University of California at Davis in International Relations and German. She has an M.A. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley, where she specialized in Soviet and U.S. foreign policy. In 1998, Breslau was one of 12 U.S. journalists selected for the prestigious John S. Knight fellowship at Stanford University. Breslau is also an experienced instructor, having taught political science at U.C. Berkeley and creative nonfiction writing at Stanford. She lives in Oakland, CA with her two children.