Meet
Diana Putterman
Humanitarian, Teacher, & Writer
Humanitarian
Ms. Putterman has bookended her life as a humanitarian. Temporarily breaking from her college courses, she became a social worker in San Ysidro, a border town of Mexico and California. Now, she volunteer teaches asylum seekers from the Congo, Guatemala and San Salvador as a retiree. Among her many travel trips with a cause, she has journeyed to Jalapa, Guatemala to help build a chicken coop for an orphanage and chaperoned twenty-seven students, including one of her sons, Sam, to help clean up the Ninth Ward in New Orleans after Katrina. Diana currently translates Spanish to English between asylum seekers and their attorneys for Immigration for Justice. Diana spent a month on the island of Lesvos, Greece, teaching English to refugees fleeing through Turkey.
Teacher
Diana taught ESL (English as a Second Language) at San Diego Unified Schools while in college and at ELS Educational Services on the campus of Dominican University in San Rafael, California. She also taught English to asylum seekers on the Island of Lesvos, Greece for REAL, Refugee Education and Learning, and for the Canal Alliance in San Rafael. She continues to teach asylum seekers online today.
Business Owner
Ms. Putterman’s career in broadcast media and advertising spanned three decades and included media sales for CBS and Pacific Broadcasting, management, and participation in the startup of two Bay Area radio stations. She eventually founded and was president of The Latino Group, which later became Turnstile, a full-service advertising agency based in Corte Madera, California and serving clients nationwide, with her business partner, Ali Shepherd.
Services included integrated marketing across traditional, digital and experiential platforms, research, strategic and media planning and implementation, creative development and execution across all platforms. Clients included banks, entertainment venues and supermarkets.
Storyteller
Diana has recently completed a book; the full story that she started with Blanquiando, the thesis culminating her masters work and memoir of her mothers’ consequential life. Hear her read excerpts from her thesis on www.TheArcStorytellers.com.
She has also presented published papers at Graduate Liberal Studies Symposiums at St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles and St. John’s University in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her thesis has received 300+ downloads and was published on Dominican Scholar in 2019. You can read excerpts from it on www.blanquiando.com.
My favorite job was as a bicycle messenger in NYC, I’m a first generation New York Dominicana from Morningside Heights, I parasailed from Sugar Loaf Mountain in Rio and I cherish my two sons, Marco and Sam.
