Steve Villano

Steve Villano, a native of Brooklyn, New York, is the former head of Governor Mario M. Cuomo’s New York City Press Office, with decades of experience in public service, public education, public health, and as CEO of several national, non-profit organizations. As a key member of Cuomo’s staff during two Presidential boomlets, Villano wrote Op-Ed pieces and worked on speeches that ranged from the First Amendment, to immigration, race relations, affordable housing, higher education, nuclear power, the environment, and ethnic stereotyping.

A labor journalist for the National Education Association for a decade, Villano has written about censorship, the rise of the Far Right in America and about sweatshop conditions at cap and gown factories in New York. He developed a national Holocaust curriculum for classroom use while with the NEA, and a curriculum on Ethics in the Workplace for Cornell University’s ILR School’s Labor Studies Program. His writing has received numerous awards from the Educational Press Association of America, the Long Island Press Club and the New York State Press Association, as well as a leadership award from the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health.

He holds a Bachelors Degree in Political Science from the State University of New York at Albany, a Masters Degree in Communications, and a Juris Doctorate (JD) from Hofstra University Law School. Villano presently lives in Northern California.