Vanessa Botelho is a two-time Emmy Award-winning television news executive and a New York City native. She is the director of the TV News and Digital Specialization, which she created and launched in Fall 2024.
Botelho is a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University’s Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, where she is conducting research on a historical memoir on Anglo-Indian identity. The project explores her family’s roots in post-colonial India and their experience emigrating from Calcutta to Brooklyn in the late 1970’s.
Botelho completed her Master’s Degree in Biography and Memoir at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a previous recipient of a scholarship from the Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography.
Botelho served as executive producer for NBC10 Boston’s weekday 11 p.m broadcast. In her role, Botelho played an integral part in the historic launch of NBC’s newest owned television station. She oversaw the editorial content on multiple NBC broadcasts and platforms, as well as those on Comcast-owned NECN, the largest regional 24-hour cable news channel in the country. She supervised a newsroom staff of roughly 25 news producers, writers, reporters, anchors, video editors, assignment desk editors, photographers, web and promotions producers. She traveled to NBC stations around the country to help train their staff. She was nominated for and completed a management program at 30 Rock.
Prior to NBC, Botelho spent 13 years as a staff show producer for WABC-TV’s No. 1 rated “Eyewitness News This Morning.” The show held the top position in Nielsen ratings across the nation during her tenure at the flagship station. She produced countless hours of live breaking news programming, including award-winning “wall to wall” coverage of Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
Botelho has produced news programs for WCBS-TV and WNYW Fox 5. She was also an entertainment producer and booker for WPIX-TV, where she played an important role in the launch of WPIX’s weekday morning show in June 2000.