Kerry Edelstein ('02)

Kerry Edelstein is the President & Founder of Research Narrative, an insights and strategy agency founded in 2011. Since her childhood years as math nerd whose teen idol was Dave Barry (he signed her yearbook), Kerry has embodied a dual identity of analytical thinker and dynamic storyteller. Whether she’s designing a customer segmentation, facilitating a strategic planning workshop, or delivering a keynote to room full of public radio producers, turning data into actionable narratives is her jam. Throughout her career, she’s advised many renowned corporate brands such as Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Discovery, YouTube, and Verizon, public media outlets such as NPR, WNET, KQED, WHYY, and WAMU, and educational institutions such as UCLA Anderson, USC Marshall (try not to boo), UVa, and RIT. A vocal advocate for multicultural strategy and representative research design, she was awarded the Insights Association’s “IA Laureate” designation for her work in championing representation in research. She’s also deeply passionate about arts education and served as Vice President of the Board of Directors for CHAMPS Charter, an LAUSD-chartered media and performing arts high school.

An accidental trendsetter, Kerry possesses an innate instinct for making uncool choices that become disruptively popular a year or two later. Or as one colleague put it before offering her an advisory board position, “If I were Whole Foods, I’d pay a lot of money to find out where you were moving next.” Kerry thus resides in between construction sites, in what Axios calls “the hottest zip code” of Charlotte, NC, where she moonlights as a hip hop dancer, spouse to an award-winning craft brewer, and dog mom to a manipulative Blue Heeler named Barleigh.

She has an MBA from UCLA Anderson and a BS in Biometry and Statistics from Cornell University.