Hello.

Rose Tibayan is the Director of Public Affairs, Office of Budget and Management, for the City of Chicago. She handles press matters for the City‘s Budget Director, Comptroller, and Chief Financial Officer. Her previous work experience includes a decade of creating content and digital media for the private sector and more than 15 years in the television news industry as an award-winning broadcast journalist who has covered thousands of stories. She began her news career as a production assistant with NBC Nightly News in New York City and went on to become a general assignment reporter, anchor, and writer at KTVU (FOX2 San Francisco), WPVI (ABC6 Philadelphia), News 12 (New Jersey), NY1 News (New York City), WINK (CBS11 Fort Myers), KUAM (NBC8 Guam), and First State News2 (Delaware). In Chicago, Rose founded the media platform, Blackline Review, a hyper-local business news website covering Chicago’s emerging companies.

SELECTED VOLUNTEER WORK

In 2015, Rose co-founded the Sampaguita Group—a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with the mission of increasing awareness about ‘Educational Downward Mobility’ affecting second-generation Filipino Americans. The group has awarded 21 partial scholarships to undergraduate and graduate students at more than a dozen U.S. colleges and universities. Rose is a member of the Digital Co-curation team at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago promoting its 10,000-object Philippines Collection. In 2014, she joined the media committee of the Hydrocephalus Association, helping to increase awareness about Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH)―a treatable imbalance of water in the brain that is often misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. Her father, Manuel, who silently suffered from NPH, had been misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s for more than a decade. After her father died, Rose served as a delegate for the Hydrocephalus Association attempting to enlighten legislators in Washington, D.C., with whom she met, about the prevalence of Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus. (Learn more about NPH from Rose’s thesis.)

ACCOLADES

Rose’s accolades include a national Excellence in Journalism Award in the Public Health category from the Association of Healthcare Journalists (AHCJ) for a three-part series about the children’s dental epidemic in Alameda County, California for KTVU-TV (FOX2 San Francisco). She is also the recipient of three Telly Awards for Excellence in multimedia production. Rose is the author of the ResumeTapebook: The Job-Hunting Handbook for Television Journalists, a resource book for neophyte and student broadcast journalists used at journalism schools nationwide, including the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in the City of New York, and the Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois.

EDUCATION

Rose holds a Master of Arts degree in medical and scientific journalism from Columbia University in the City of New York, where she was a Robert Wood Johnson Medical Foundation scholar and Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation fellow. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Delaware and received a Professional Certificate in Municipal Finance from the University of Chicago.

ETC.

To chronicle the experiences of Filipino American women who, like herself, grew up as Americans, Rose launched the online magazine, Ligaya. In 2014, she won the People’s Choice award among a field of 60 entrants in the Mrs. International competition where she represented her birth country, the Philippines, and advocated for increased awareness of the treatable dementia, Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH). Rose is fluent in Tagalog, loves to ski, and a vegetarian who strongly advocates for animal rights. She lives in Chicago with her husband, Don Villar, and a Calico named Alexandra. ✿

SELECTED WORK