20th Television Publicity Chief Shari Rosenblum Is Leaving Disney After 26 Years
The studio's head of publicity behind campaigns for Modern Family, Homeland and Percy Jackson is exiting through Disney's voluntary early retirement offer.
Shari Rosenblum, the Senior Vice President and Head of Publicity for 20th Television and 20th Television Animation, is leaving Disney after 26 years. If you have followed the promotion of shows like Modern Family, Homeland or The Simpsons, you have seen her work.
She is departing as part of the voluntary early retirement offer Disney extended to qualifying longtime employees. She plans to take a little time off before she decides what comes next.
Rosenblum has been at the company long enough to earn a 25 year service Tinker Bell statue. She started when the studio was still 20th Century Fox Television, and she stayed on after Disney acquired Fox.
Rosenblum joined 20th Century Fox about 26 years ago, working in consumer products and home entertainment. Then the studio's co-heads at the time, Dana Walden and Gary Newman, recruited her over to television.
Early on, she also worked in talent relations, events and awards strategy. She became a Senior Vice President in 2017 and took over the studio's publicity team in 2022. All told, she spent about two decades at 20th Television and its Fox era predecessor.
Before the TV job, her résumé included licensing campaigns for Ice Age, Planet of the Apes and The Simpsons. She began her career in literary publicity, representing books and authors.
Over the years she led hundreds of studio publicity campaigns across streaming, cable and broadcast. Those covered shows for Disney+, Hulu, ABC, FX and National Geographic, plus third party platforms.
The list is a good one. It includes New Girl, The Dropout, Furious, Modern Family, Homeland, The Beast in Me and Percy Jackson and the Olympians. She also worked on Family Guy, The Simpsons, multiple Muppets projects, both versions of Arrested Development, and projects from Dan Fogelman and Liz Heldens.
Her Homeland work earned her the Maxwell Weinberg Showmanship Award for Television. She was a member of the Local 600 International Cinematographers and Publicists Guild from 2005 to 2022, and she has served on the board of P.S. Arts since 2019.
Candice Ashton, Executive Vice President of Publicity for Disney Entertainment Television and Rosenblum's current boss, shared the news in a note to staff. She praised Rosenblum for leading publicity with brilliance and grace, and said few people have shaped the studio's voice and reputation the way she did.
Ashton also called her a true pro and a champion for many teams and creative partners. She thanked her for being a great partner through every curveball, and said she will miss the laughs they shared.
Rosenblum said she is leaving with nothing but gratitude. She thanked Walden and Newman for taking a chance on an ambitious young publicist more than twenty years ago, and credited mentors along the way, including Shannon Ryan and Ashton.
She also gave a nod to Karey Burke and the executives at 20th TV for the final stretch of her run. She said it has been a privilege to tell stories for the industry's top storytellers, and she thanked the journalists who cover television.
Her influence reaches well beyond her own team. She mentored many publicists who started out as her assistants, and people she helped shape now work at CBS, FGS Global, Disney Entertainment Television and Sony Television.
Rosenblum's exit lands in the middle of a rough year of staffing changes at Disney. Early retirement was offered in August. Since Josh D'Amaro succeeded Bob Iger as CEO, more than 1,000 employees were laid off in April, and hundreds more at Pixar, ESPN and National Geographic were let go in July.
In September, hundreds of layoffs hit mostly the tech and HR departments. At the end of October, at least a hundred employees from the parks division, including Walt Disney Imagineering and Disney Live Entertainment, were laid off.
A newer report suggests Disney is planning thousands more job cuts and has asked managers to trim annual costs by 20%. Disney has not confirmed that. Some former Disney executives, including Naomi Bulochnikov-Paul and Peter Rice, have recently landed new roles at Netflix.
For scale, Disney had 231,000 employees at the end of fiscal year 2025, with 172,000 in the U.S. and 59,000 elsewhere. The parks division brought in $36.2 billion that year, more than 56% of the company's total income.
For TV fans, Rosenblum's departure closes a long chapter at one of the studio's most prolific publicity teams. No successor has been announced.
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