Icon Award Winner

Throughout her career and in “retirement,” JUDY GIRARD’s default setting has been to break molds.

In her various television executive roles, Girard redefined several formats that influenced programming – as well as pop culture – at the lifestyle networks where she worked.

In 2008, she retired from television, packed up her newly earned Lifetime Achievement Emmy along with the rest of her belongings, and moved to Wilmington.

It wasn’t long before Girard began building partnerships in her new hometown and set her sights on another groundbreaking project: the state’s first all-girls charter school.

In 2013, Girard and GEORGIA MILLER announced they started a nonprofit to develop what would become Girls Leadership Academy of Wilmington, or GLOW.

“So, I started to dream about that in retirement the last few years,” Girard said to an audience at the Greater Wilmington Business Journal’s Power Breakfast in late 2013. “Of what would it feel like to reach back and reach over that … economic divide and give those girls a shot? How else could you do it?”

GLOW’s structure was inspired by the Young Women’s Leadership Network schools, the first of which opened in Harlem, New York. It operated as a public-private model in which the schools were public and supported by a private foundation.

The idea for GLOW, envisioned to reach underserved communities throughout the region, was to educate girls in grades 6-12, “giving them an opportunity to prepare them, not to be high-school graduates but to be college graduates,” Miller said at that first announcement.

The school opened in 2016 with its first group of sixth graders, and in 2023, GLOW saw its first graduating class.

Graduates of the past two years were accepted to colleges, and they collectively earned over $7 million in scholarships over the past three years to fund their collegiate educations, according to school officials.

“I think the girls at GLOW, I think the messages they get, first and foremost from everybody here, every teacher, is be yourself, find your strengths, find your interests and be yourself,” Girard said earlier this summer.

Throughout GLOW’s buildup, Girard tapped connections from her career, bringing celebrity chefs from Tyler Florence to Giada De Laurentiis to Wilmington for sold-out fundraisers to support the school.

The concept of modern celebrity chefs was an era that Girard helped usher in during her time as general manager and president of the Food Network between 1998 and 2005, where she brought on soon-to-become household names such as Rachael Ray and Bobby Flay, along with competition-style shows such as Iron Chef. During her time as president, viewership grew significantly for the Food Network.

Though one of the most visible parts of her career, the Food Network wasn’t the only time Girard retooled how viewers consumed television.

As senior vice president of programming and production for the Lifetime network, she helped develop the Lifetime Original Movie. As vice president of program development for the NBC owned-and-operated television stations, she played a key role in syndication partnerships for the popular talk shows The Phil Donahue Show and Sally, Sally Jessy Raphael’s show.

Girard, who finished out her television career as president of HGTV, started in broadcasting in 1968 at a local ABC station in Philadelphia. But her interest started during her college years when she and her roommate JESSICA SAVITCH wanted to gain experience – Savitch reporting on air and Girard producing in the background.

“There was a television station there, and it was on cable, so it was real, and we wanted to work on it,” Girard recalls about the college station. “And we went and applied, and they said no girls can be on the air. And at the time, there were no women on the air doing news. It was a general belief that news had to come from guys.

“I mean, that was just part of the restriction, and it took us two years to change that,” she continues. “And I watched her do it piece by piece.”

Savitch eventually made it to the national level, becoming NBC Nightly News’ weekend anchor.

When Girard broke into the commercial television world decades ago, she says she faced similar roadblocks as at the college station in the late ’60s.

“And so, we did it all over again, and a whole bunch of women did it with us,” Girard recalls. “And it wasn’t about was about taking on bad people. It was about showing that there was a financial value to having women anchor newscasts and do other things around this nation.”

To view the Women to Watch Awards Finalists main page, click here.

To view more of photographer Madeline Gray’s work, go to madelinegrayphoto.com.

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