Dara McQuillan

As Chief Marketing & Communications Officer for Silverstein Properties, Dara oversees the firm’s public relations, media, advertising, documentary, branding, events, and digital and social media activities. He is a member of the company’s management committee, and works with the leadership team and top executives on a wide range of corporate matters, with direct responsibility for the company’s marketing and communications initiatives.

Highlights of Dara’s work include building a team of some of the industry’s leading marketing professionals; developing a long-term World Trade Center repositioning and branding strategy; the construction, opening and marketing of 3 WTC, 4 WTC and 7 WTC – for which his group was awarded a Silver Anvil from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA); unveiling designs for the iconic One WTC and the subsequent buildings at the WTC site; Silverstein’s successful “two occurrence” insurance litigation; launching several commercial and residential websites and dozens of social media channels; and overseeing a program to document the historic rebuilding project through feature films, TV documentaries, books, photographs, art, and interactive media.

Dara is the editor of A Century Downtown, a visual history of Lower Manhattan, and Chairman of the Advisory Board of Downtown magazine. He works with dozens of artists, photographers, and filmmakers to document the company’s rebuilding projects. For the past several years, Dara has invited a group of international street artists into raw, unoccupied floors to use them as a canvas and gallery installation, in the words of Forbes, “flipping the corporate office script Silicon Valley style.”

Previously, Dara was the Communications & Media Manager of Shearman & Sterling LLP, a corporate law firm of 850 lawyers in 20 cities around the world. Based in New York, he was responsible for devising and managing strategies to maintain and build the firm’s reputation, image, and visibility. In June 2003, Dara’s group was awarded a Silver Anvil from the PRSA for its work on behalf of a Sept. 11 pro bono client of the firm.

Dara began his career as a reporter at Variety and Daily Variety in Los Angeles. He has also worked at Academy Award-winning Merchant Ivory Productions, Robert DeNiro’s Tribeca Film Center, and Universal Pictures.

Earlier in his career, Dara worked in the Department of Public Information of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, and in New York, where he wrote an analytical and historical study of the United Nations library that became an official publication of the UN.

Born in Ireland and raised in Brussels, Belgium, Dara studied at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he graduated with a Master’s degree in Philosophy. He spent a year as an Erasmus Scholar at the University of Bologna, Italy, where he studied Italian and philosophy under Umberto Eco. Upon graduation, Dara won a Bobby Jones Jr. Graduate Fellowship to UCLA.