Celisa Steele
Leading Learning Faculty

Celisa Steele is a seasoned entrepreneur with a unique blend of experience in marketing, technology, and education. She co-founded Tagoras, which provides expert strategy, marketing, and technology consulting services to organizations in the business of lifelong learning.

Celisa spearheads Tagoras’s research and publications, and she’s written numerous reports, white papers, and blog posts that explore learning, technology, their overlap, and more. Association Virtual Events, Association Learning + Technology, and Association Learning Management Systems are three of the most comprehensive reports available on learning and technology in the association sector.

In her career, Celisa has led the development and deployment of successful online education sites with numerous organizations ranging from smaller groups like the Frameworks Institute and the Alliance of Chicago Community Health Services to large national and multinational organizations like the American Red Cross, the American College of Radiology, the Society for Human Resource Management, and WebJunction, an initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Before Tagoras, Celisa was a co-founder and chief operating officer of Isoph, one of the leading providers of e-learning services to the nonprofit sector. Prior to Isoph, she worked in creative services at Quisic, a developer of high-end online course content for major universities and Global 2000 companies.

Celisa worked in curriculum development for the not-for-profit Family and Children’s Resource Program (FCRP), part of the Jordan Institute for Families at the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Celisa is also a poet and served as the poet laureate of Carrboro, North Carolina, where she lives, from 2013 to 2016.