Evans’ career is vast, beginning in government and culminating as the Executive Vice President of CNN. Evans began working with CNN at its inception in 1980 and was promoted to Executive Vice President for CNN in 1996. In September 2000, Evans was named to Executive Vice President of Domestic Networks for the CNN Newsgroup. She was responsible for program and talent development of all domestic networks overseeing national and international talk shows and the Network Guest Bookings Department, which schedules about 25,000 guests each year. She served as a member of the CNN Executive Committee and was chairperson of the CNN programming task force. In addition, Evans developed some of CNN’s most popular programs. Evans retired from CNN in the summer of 2001.
Evans began her career in the early 1960s, working on a number of congressional staffs. She worked at the White House in the Office of the Special Counsel to the President during the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration and was instrumental in the creation of the president’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and the 1966 Civil Rights Act. During the late 1960s, Evans lived in Moscow with her husband, who was then Moscow bureau chief for CBS News. After returning to the United States in 1970, she was a founding partner of Global Research Services, an Atlanta-based research and marketing firm.
Evans is active in numerous Georgia and National charities and served for two years as the chairperson of the Georgia Endowment for the Humanities. In 1979, she was nominated to Leadership Atlanta. Evans was appointed by President Clinton to the Commission on White House Fellows.
She is a member of the Board of Visitors at the Georgia State University School of Law and the Kennesaw State Univ. Foundation. Evans is currently a Visiting Professor at the School of Management at Georgia Tech teaching a course on Gender, Race and Ethnicity in Organizational Behavior.
Additionally Evans is a member of the board of the Society for Women’s Health Research, the Radio Television News Directors Foundation, the Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, The Society for Women’s Business Research and the Atlanta Girls School. Evans also has been elected to membership in the Committee 200, The International Women’s Forum and the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1995, she was named to the YWCA’s Academy of Women Achievers and is a compass award recipient of the Women’s Leadership Exchange. Evans is also a founding board member of Greenstone Media, creator of the first FM radio network of talk geared to the female audience.
Evans holds a bachelor’s degree from Bennington College in Vermont. She is the mother of three and the grandmother of seven. She resides in Atlanta. Georgia.