Denielle Pemberton-Heard
Shareholder, Global Managing Director Chief Legal Officer, Diversified Search Group (DSG)
Denielle Pemberton-Heard is a shareholder, Global Managing Director, and Chief Legal Officer of Diversified Search Group (DSG) where she is responsible for strategically scaling a portfolio of board, executive level, and legal counsel searches across multiple sectors. She is a member of the Executive Committee leading the firm and is committed to executive succession planning, talent development, and corporate social responsibility initiatives. She takes pride in placing emerging leaders in seats of POWER.
Denielle joined Diversified following fifteen years as Group Counsel, Programming and Business Affairs at the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the nation’s largest non- commercial media enterprise where she led negotiations and directed content acquisition and transactional work across multi-media platforms on behalf of PBS and its 300 plus member stations.
Before joining PBS, Denielle served as Group Counsel for Thales, Inc., Vice President, Legal and Business Affairs at Time Life (TWX) and in-house positions at Discovery Communications, Inc. (DISCA). She began her law career with Wiggin and Dana and was subsequently associated with Cowan Liebowitz and Latman, where she focused on intellectual property litigation and published scholarly works in the area of copyright and trademark law.
Denielle served as a Regional Judge for President Obama’s Presidential Commission on White House Fellowships. She has also served as a Trustee of the Toy Industry of America Foundation, on the Advisory Committee of DCVLP (DC Volunteer Lawyers Program to end domestic violence), and a past Board of Governor of the Case Western School of Law.
Denielle is also an independent director on the boards of & Pizza® a restaurant chain and Lockchain® a cyber security platform for the crypto currency sector. As an Advisor to Pod Networks, a P/E backed operator of STEMconnector she remains committed to increasing the number of STEM-ready workers in the global talent pool supporting leaders across 200 organizations.
Though a native of New Rochelle, New York, as a 20 years plus resident of DC, Denielle has been involved in the community as a Trustee of the March on Washington Film Festival and the Greater Washington Area Community Foundation where she chairs the Nominations and Governance Committee.
Denielle is a past member of the professional faculty of the Johns Hopkins University Carey School of Business, where she lectured on business law and has also been a panelist at Harvard Business School’s Black Investor Summit.
A thought leader and a friend, Denielle has been featured on several podcasts and media outlets. She was honored as Diversity Woman’s Class of 2022 Elite 100 list of Black women leaders for her work in connection with the Diversity Committee of the Association of Executive Search Consultants (AESC): She was recently elevated to the Americas board. While she loves her day job, Denielle recently partnered as a Producer of BET’s fashion documentary hosted by Billy Porter—Style Gods.
She is the proud mother of two college graduates.
