• Home
  • Past President Joanne Littlefield

Joanne Littlefield

Joanne Littlefield

ACE President 2014-15
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado

Joanne Littlefield grew up in the hustle and bustle of the city of Chicago. She earned her bachelor of science degree from Southern Illinois University with a dual major in broadcast journalism and environmental studies. Her love of telling the stories of people who lived and worked on the land through mass media led her to niche reporting for Illinois radio stations before moving to Arizona and working for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. She learned about land grant universities and Extension programs as a participant in the Arizona Master Gardener program, where she fulfilled her volunteer obligation as she began producing the Extension TV program, Farm and Home, on the CBS affiliate in the Phoenix market. That led to a successful career with the University of Arizona College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Extension as a video producer, science writer and media relations liaison (1979-2008). During that time she also earned her master’s degree in mass communication from Arizona State University, where her thesis was a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the front page images of the Navajo Times newspaper. 

In 2008, Littlefield moved to Colorado State University, where she is the director of outreach and engagement for Extension, overseeing communication and marketing efforts for Extension programs statewide. She earned her doctorate from Colorado State in 2016, with the dissertation “Visual Rhetoric of U.S. Agricultural Films: Auteurs, Actors and Assimilation”.

Littlefield has received the the ACE Pioneer Award, and Electronic Media Award of Excellence. She served as the Arizona state rep, and electronic media SIG chair, served on many ACE conference program committees, and was the program co-chair for the 2012 ACE meeting in Annapolis. Littlefield and Colorado State University graduate student Marie Allen received a development fund grant to assess the ACE archives in the Special Collections of the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland, and is currently the ACE curator, an ex-officio member of the ACE board.

2014-15 ACE Board

President Joanne Littlefield; President-elect Brad Beckman; Vice President Steve Miller; Past President Becky Kock; SIG Director Doug Edlund; Marketing Director Kevin Leigh Smith; Membership Director Bruce Sundeen; Professional Development Director Rhonda Conlon; Research Director Tracy Irani; Retiree Director Bob Furbee; Executive Director Holly Young; Treasurer Elaine Edwards.

©2023 Association for Communication Excellence in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Life and Human Sciences

ACE Office: 847-647-8861

Powered by Wild Apricot Membership Software