Susan J. Reilly 

Susan Reilly is President and Founder of Reilly Connect, a strategic communications agency redefining how organizations communicate in an era shaped by innovation, disruption, and accelerating public scrutiny. With more than 25 years of experience advising global brands, emerging health-tech leaders, and high-stakes professional services organizations, Reilly has earned a reputation as a strategist who can see around corners—and help others do the same. Since launching the firm after a successful career at two global agencies, she has weathered through the challenges of agency management, client development, and people management always with a focus on bringing the highest value with efficiency to every assignment. Reilly embraces Ai enabled technology as it shifts the fantasty of high speed efficiency into a reality further strengthening the firm’s competitive advantage. Reilly knows that today’s communications requires both modern capability and experienced judgment and has built the firm to deliver both.

Throughout her career, Reilly has operated at the intersection of technology, brand reputation, and complex regulated industries, translating breakthrough science, precision data, and intricate legal landscapes into narratives that inspire confidence and drive action. She built Reilly Connect on a simple but ambitious belief: that organizations navigating uncertainty deserve communications counsel rooted in ethics, evidence, and real-world impact.

Reilly leads the agency’s strategic communications planning and executional oversight. She is known as a hands-on leader and for her ability to distill complexity into clarity, galvanize leadership around a shared vision, and craft communications systems that prioritize both transparency and long-term trust. The firm’s approach blends technology-informed insights—including AI-enabled analysis—with the nuance and judgment that only seasoned human experience can provide.

Her advisory portfolio includes collaborations with global healthcare innovators, precision-medicine disruptors, leading law firms, high profile litigation, and organizations shaping the future of digital health and responsible AI adoption. Whether guiding a CEO through a high-stakes media moment, helping an early-stage innovator articulate its market narrative for the first time or managing media interest in litigation, Reilly’s work consistently sits at the center of strategic decision-making, sound counsel and stealth execution.

Under her leadership, Reilly Connect has received numerous industry honors, including the PRSA Silver Anvil, one of the most prestigious awards in communications. Reilly has been recognized among the Top 50 Women Leaders of Illinois and as a Top Woman in PR by PR Week, a reflection of her influence on the communications landscape.

Beyond her professional accomplishments, Reilly brings a creative lens shaped by theatre, comedy, and photography—disciplines that sharpen her instincts for storytelling and human connection. A licensed sailor and proud mother of three, she splits her time between Chicago and Denver while leading a national consultancy focused on helping organizations communicate with integrity, intelligence, and impact.