Printable Biography of Nell Minow

Nell Minow writes as the Movie Mom about movies, television, the Internet, and parenting. She writes the Media Mom column in the Chicago Tribune and her articles have appeared in USA Today, Family Fun, Child magazine, Daughters magazine, Parents magazine, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Kansas City Star, Slate, and three editions of The Practical Guide to Practically Everything. Her book, The Movie Mom's Guide to Family Movies was published by Avon in 1999, with a second edition published by iUniverse in 2004. She reviews movies every week on radio stations across the US and in Canada. Her reviews appear as a section within the Yahoo! movie site. Nell is a member of the Online Film Critics Society, the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Washington Area Film Critics Association.

Additionally, she writes a blog called More About Movies.

Nell Minow is Editor of The Corporate Library, an independent research firm that rates boards of directors of public companies and compiles research, study and critical thinking about corporate governance. Its board effectiveness rating allows investors and analysts to evaluate governance as an element of investment risk. Ms. Minow was named one of the 30 most influential investors of 2002 by Smart Money Magazine and called "the queen of good corporate governance" by Business Week Online.

Ms. Minow was formerly a Principal of LENS, a $150 million investment firm that bought stock in underperforming companies and used shareholder activism to increase their value. She was dubbed "the CEO Killer" by Fortune magazine for her record of ousting non-performing CEOs at companies like Sears, American Express, Kodak, and Waste Management. Before that, she served as President of Institutional Shareholder Services, Inc., a firm that advises institutional investors on issues of corporate governance, and as an attorney at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Department of Justice.

She frequently comments on the financial markets in the press and on television, including op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today, on network news broadcasts at ABC, NBC, and CBS, and on ABC's Nightline, CNBC's Kudlow & Cramer, CNN's Crossfire and Moneyline and PBS' Newshour. She has written more than 200 articles about corporate governance as well as chapters in treatises on executive compensation, annual shareholder meetings, and in the books Law Stories, The Dance of Change, The Financial Services Revolution, Leadership and Governance from the Inside Out, and How to Run a Company. She is co-author with Robert A. G. Monks of three books, Power and Accountability, (HarperBusiness 1991), the textbook Corporate Governance (Blackwell 1995, 2001, and 2004), and Watching the Watchers: Corporate Governance for the 21st Century (Blackwell 1996).

She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Chicago Law School. And she is the daughter of former FCC Chairman Newton Minow, who called television "a vast wasteland."